When a resident of Makana Municipality discovered that his RDP house was cracking up, he contacted the municipal offices and demanded that they send someone to repair the walls.
When a resident of Makana Municipality discovered that his RDP house was cracking up, he contacted the municipal offices and demanded that they send someone to repair the walls.
When a dispute arose between farm occupants and farm owners in Manley Flats, both sides expected their councillor to step in and resolve the issue.
Those same farm occupants complained to the mayor that they did not have water tanks, electricity or transport for their children to go to school.
The municipality is blamed for water outages, poor water quality, blackouts, poor service at hospitals, traffic lights that take too long and donkeys that wander around the streets at night.
When municipal workers went on strike and turned our normally dirty streets into pigsties – most of us blamed the municipality.
Is all this criticism fair? Can we justifiably expect municipal officials to commission new transformers for our electricity supplies, take care of the car wash, see to it that the goat project has milking facilities and oversee the construction of houses in the township?
It is obvious that our existing municipality does not have the financial resources, time nor skills to successfully accomplish all of the above and much more.
It would appear that the municipality is trying to solve too many problems all at once and not being all that successful to boot.
The municipality tries to take on too much because it makes too many promises. This might be a result of general goodwill which causes them to try to help everybody, or it may be because of grand political campaigns that promise a land of milk and honey to those who vote for them.
In order to narrow the gap between current service delivery levels and community expectations, the municipal leadership should reassess its core functions and decide on what it is supposed to do and what is extraneous to municipal functions.
It needs to do this in conjunction with the community it serves, and only once officials, workers and the community agree on these core functions will it be able to set about achieving specific goals. In other words, the municipality needs to revise its own job description.
