The Chairperson of the Limpopo Geographical Names Council said this week that he is still waiting for the office to convene a meeting. The issue at stake is the name of the town Louis Trichardt.

This came after Mr André Naudé of the Chairpersons Association said on April 2 that he had heard on a radio broadcast in March that the Names Council will sit on the name issue during June.

“We heard on Monitor for the first time, about two weeks ago, that the Names Council is going to sit during June to decide the issue and that they have asked further documentation from the Makhado Municipality which was submitted to them without our knowledge and without our having an opportunity to respond thereto,” Naudé said at the annual general meeting of the CA.

Mr Mavhungu Musitha, chairperson of the provincial geographical names council in Polokwane, said telephonically on April 6 that he was not personally aware of a date in June.

“Once our office is ready, they will convene the meeting. They will check the availability of the members. The committee will look into the recommendations of the Makhado Municipality. Once the committee has adjudicated the recommendations, they will make a recommendation to the authorities, who will make a decision,” Musitha said.

The name of the town Louis Trichardt was changed to Makhado and then back to Louis Trichardt, after the appeal court had given judgement in March 2006 to set aside the name Makhado. The judgement was in favour of the Chairpersons Association and followed long, drawn-out court procedures after the Makhado Municipality changed the name of the town to Makhado without proper consultation.

The Makhado Municipality started anew and, by the end of 2006, they recommended to the Limpopo Provincial Geographical Names Council that the name of the town be changed to Makhado again. The procedure that was followed was once again regarded by the CA as flawed, manipulated and not classifiable as consultation.

In January 2007, the CA sent a formal objection to the same council, totalling 202 pages.

The CA said that the municipality should first have consulted whether there was any need to change the name of the town and should not have conveyed loads of people to meetings to vote for a name. They said that changing the name of the town to Makhado would polarise the people of the region.

During 2008, the provincial geographical names council requested the Makhado Municipality to conduct a meeting with the CA. The meeting eventually took place on June 18.

“During this meeting, the CA had not been consulted at all and tried for more than an hour to make its point without any success while being interrupted by the chairperson of the meeting, Cllr Mudau,” the CA reported at its AGM. Naudé formally objected to the names council in the form of a letter dated June 23, 2008 and included a soundtrack of the meeting. Letters requesting the names council for a copy of the recommendation of the Makhado Municipality elicited no response.

When the Zoutpanberger asked Mr Musitha when he could be contacted to get the date of the name council’s meeting, he replied, “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”