Dear Ward 48 Residents.
The last few months have been the most difficult for all of us, family have lost their loved ones to the dreadful COVID 19, people have lost their jobs, businesses closed down and the City was placed under administration by the ANC Provincial Administration. Lest we forget the impact this had on the residents of the City.
DA Councillors kept on serving the people during this time even if they were not Councilors anymore. At last sanity prevailed and the Supreme Court of Appeals have issued a scathing order and highlighted the wrongful decisions that were made by the ANC Provincial Executive. Looking back on the first few weeks that we have been reinstated I thought it well to give some insight into what is currently happening in the City of Tshwane.
City Finances
The major finding is that – The City’s Finances are in Dire Straits. For those that are not aware or have not seen the media reports, when we took back control of the City, we have found the City in a financial dire situation. The Mayor reported within the first week it has found that the City has a deficit of over R4 billion in just seven months when Council has been collapsed by the ANC led Province.
Quote- “The new Executive Mayor says the city’s debtor’s book has spiraled out of control and is implementing austerity measures. Tshwane executive mayor Randall Williams has announced his team and already implemented austerity measures, which include cutting catering costs and restricting international travel. No more free lunches as the city’s finances are under strain. There was a deficit of R4-billion from the past fiscal year” collection rates have dropped to an all-time low of 83%.
The budget we inherited is the one we unfortunately have to live with until we are able to do some adjustments in the operational budget in February 2021 and to refocus our budget on basic service delivery. Time is also not on our side as we only have 10 months to turn around the City after what we have found when we came back.
Expired and mismanagement tenders
A number of tenders have expired and have been mismanaged, for example we have found that the yellow plant tender for graders, front end loaders, trucks etc. has expired, and this has put a serious constraint on operational management of a number of areas like grading, grass cutting and illegal waste clean-up. We have also found that the waste management contractors tender been in shambles, this now requires the DA led administration to fix these anomalies. The impact of the expired tenders also had an impact on material and stock levels, which makes it difficult to maintain sufficient stock levels and the MMC for Utilities Services have already expedited the most critical items and to ensure we have sufficient stock levels to repair and replace broken and stolen equipment and items. These items include material for electrical repairs, potholes, water meters, transformers and the likes.
War room
As part of the Mayor’s intervention we have established a war room where the Mayor tracks service delivery on a dashboard per region and per department. This is a data driven model whereby results are measured based on the faults reported by residents. It is therefore critical that residents report service delivery issues in their suburbs and obtain a reference number, this allows us to get a true picture where the priority issues are and where budget will be spent. Regional Directors and senior official’s performances are managed based on this information.
Integrated Urban management plan.
As part of the Mayor’s intervention in the war room, each Director of a region has been given an instruction to compile an Integrated Urban management plan (IUM). This plan gives us insight into which department and teams are working where and when. As the City is faced with limited resources, each ward is allocated their portion of the plan to focus the resources and to try and create an even spread within the constraints of the City. We will share these plans as they become available.
CAPEX Budget
This is the budget for all new upgrades or new projects that the City envisaged to do. As the CAPEX budget has already been approved by the then administrator for the 2020/21 year, we are only able to submit a new CAPEX proposal for each ward for the 2021/22 year.
As residents you would have the right to submit your proposed suggestions on which upgrades and developments we must focus on in the ward.
I have created an online form for any resident in Ward 48 to submit their inputs online. This would assist me to submit a comprehensive list of proposed IDP projects. Please follow the the following link to capture your proposed project. The deadline for the IDP submissions is 2nd December 2020.
Backlog Service delivery Issues
Since we took over the governance of the City in November, a number of backlog service delivery issues have been raised by residents. As we are in the process of establishing which issues have been raised and not been dealt with I have put an online document to assist us to identify these issues that we need to raise with officials responsible for these outstanding matters. We are only able to assist and escalate matters that have been previously reported and not been resolved and that have reference numbers. You are requested to Click on the following link and fill the form in.
This will give us an idea of the outstanding matters we need to escalate to responsible officials and to ensure it stays on the system until it’s resolved.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Cllr Kingsley Wakelin
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E-mail: ward48.da@gmail.com
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