The Makana council says they will not tolerate any "service delivery related sabotage" carried out by municipal officials in the technical and infrastructural services directorate.
The Makana council says they will not tolerate any "service delivery related sabotage" carried out by municipal officials in the technical and infrastructural services directorate.
Delivering his opening statement during last week’s housing and infrastructure portfolio committee’s meeting, newly-appointed committee chair Zamuxolo Peter warned officials that he will not tolerate sloppy work and laziness. He appealed to technicals services director Dabula Njilo to provide him with office space so that he can "monitor the looseness in that directorate".
"I hope that my role of political oversight doesn’t get confused with interfering with the municipality’s administration," he pleaded. He warned Njilo to refrain from taking so many trips out of town and suggested that junior officials rather be sent to workshops and ceremonies.
"Not every invite which comes through our faxes should be honoured, because there are service delivery-related complaints which should be prioritised over trips," he explained. "There is a complaint that our workers do not do their work, which begs the question, do managers do their work of managing the workers?" he said.
He added that the municipality has a management challenge which he said became evident in how the recent water crisis was managed. He also said that had there been effective management the response time would have been reduced drastically. In August a water outage saw several areas in Grahamstown going without water for a whole week.
Peter also said that the technical services directorate has a history of workers leaving it after spending a short stint here. "We hear a story that says they leave because of greener pastures elsewhere, something which I dipsute," he added.
He also suggested that the municipality really takes trouble to fill vacancies with highly appointed people but that this should not be based on race. "Even if somebody is white, let’s take that person so that we, at least, don’t compromise the quality of our services," he said.
He applauded Makana Mayor Vumile Lwana for his interventions meant to alleviate the lack of basic services in informal settlements. He added that since his appointment in July, Lwana has had "fruitful" meetings with residents of several informal setllements.
