On 14 May 2026 the GOOD Party engaged political and executive leadership of the Public Safety Portfolio Committee after receiving a complaint from a community member regarding the cleaning of the Berg River. Waterways such as the Berg River require consistent, year-on-year weed removal, vegetation rehabilitation and sediment removal to restore its health and ensure that the river does not break its banks and flood surrounding areas. Something the Berg River is infamously known for.
In our Portfolio Committee exchange, GOOD proposed that Drakenstein takes charge of this challenge by ensuring that the river is regularly cleaned and restored. In addition, the municipality engages with the national Minister of Water and Sanitation to raise awareness around the current state of the river and for the national department to assist the municipality in this process; considering that all major and minor rivers, lakes, estuaries and other critical water bodies fall under the authority of the national government.
The GOOD Party is happy to report that on 8 June 2026 Executive Director, Eda Barnard, reported back to the Committee that the Departments of Public Safety and Engineering Services are now actively seeking budget availability for the 2026/2027 financial year to personally take responsibility for the cleaning of the Berg River going forward and by doing so, combat yearly flooding that destroys lives and livelihoods along the river banks.
This is a win for collaborative governance where policy ideas from opposition parties are successful in developing policy and becoming solutions that better benefit the lives of the people within the municipality, province or the country.
Environmental justice is a founding pillar of the GOOD Party’s political offering to residents, and it remains a critical element in our governance structure.
Creating a healthy environment for water to flow, especially when adverse winter rain seems to destroy everything in its path, will assist the municipality to limit much of the flood damage and utilise its critical resources elsewhere when these environmental challenges occur.
GOOD Community Engagement: The party encourages active community participation in governance.
Mental
Kiff / Kief – cool [kif]/[k-eef] Derived from the Arabic kayf, meaning enjoyment or well-being, kiff or kief is most often used to convey similar feelings of nice, cool, great.Example: “This chow is kiff my bru!”
Titanium Ladybug
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.