The City of Johannesburg has been urged to coordinate its efforts at addressing service delivery challenges in Region F. Addressing a Ward Councillor Forum meeting to provide feedback to the councillors on projects, programmes and service delivery issues at the Brixton Multipurpose Centre on Thursday, 8 September 2022, Member of the Mayoral Committee for Group Corporate and Shared Services, Cllr Leah Knott who serves as the political head responsible for Citizen Relations and Urban Management (CRUM) urged for coordinated approach to service delivery.
The meeting was also attended by officials from different city departments and entities who delivered presentations on their capital projects and repairs and maintenance schedules within the region.
Some major capital projects currently underway in the region include the resurfacing of the M2 motorway westbound carriage way from New Goch road to Maritzburg offramp, Booysens sewer pipe replacement project, Bezuidenhout Valley sewer pipe replacement and others.
MM Knott said she has been doing random service delivery oversight exercises to understand the challenges and monitor service delivery progress in different region and ward. In some areas it was found that teams were missing.
“There seems to be no coordination between entities, therefore there is a need to streamline processes and coordination among the different entities with the overall aim of creating a city that gets the basics right. Although we have seen a big uptick on service delivery, there is still a long way to go,” said Cllr Knott.
The Augmented Fields Services programme (AFS) is designed to augment work by City of Johannesburg entities and departments however there is a lack of consistency across the wards which will be addressed to ensure that every ward benefits equally across the City, Cllr Knott added.
Councillors raised a variety of service delivery issues in their Wards, including a high theft of bins, no maintenance and vagrancy in parks, high number of illegal water and electricity connections, illegal spaza shops, illegal buildings, and electricity problems logged and closed without being resolved.
Other raised concerns were about the shoddy work by some service providers. All echoed the sentiments that some officials are not dedicated in their jobs hence it is crucial to introduce consequence management. Irene Mafune, Region F’s Regional Director, said service delivery has improvement in most wards since the introduction of the AFS programme. Each ward has a dedicated team that work tirelessly to augment the work done by most entities.The councillors pleaded with the city to move with speed to address the issues of the region as the region is the gateway of Joburg.
Written by Dudu Lushaba
08/09/2022