Last week’s water crisis has unequivocally proven that Makana municipality does not have the skills required to manage a water reticulation system.
Last week’s water crisis has unequivocally proven that Makana municipality does not have the skills required to manage a water reticulation system.
One pipe burst per year is far too many and completely unacceptable.
If that burst pipe caused an outage of more than an hour then the accounting officer should resign immediately after repairing the break.
In the month of March 2013, Makana municipality has had more, and longer crises than a well run municipality should have in a century.
Yet in spite of the gross incompetence of senior municipal officials they continue to receive magnificent salaries.
Top Makana officials are paid more than R1 million a year, therefore a single 10-minute outage is not acceptable.
Why do our officials not have performance-based salaries? They would go home penniless every month.
In this last week, Makana’s inability to provide basic water supplies has caused an enormous amount of damage directly to local businesses and to the already tarnished reputation of Grahamstown.
The long-term cost of this week’s crisis will bite for many years to come.
More than 50 000 visitors who attended Scifest Africa will return to their homes all over the country with one lasting, shared memory – that of a town where you cannot maintain personal hygiene because there is no running water.
This week, most Rhodes University students will also be returning to their homes with equally smelly images of a town that once stood proud.
When these visitors and students meet their friends and family they will all relate how this most recent crisis made their lives a misery.
The damage to the reputation of Scifest and Rhodes University is incalculable.
There are two reasons why the running of Makana Municipality is a full-blown fiasco – the first is that people are appointed to jobs because they conform to what the ruling party thinks of a loyal cadre and second because employees are being paid salaries even though they do not do the job.
Free advice to City Hall: – we do not need strategy sessions at luxury hotels or organising committee slumber parties at expensive game lodges.
Only hire people who know what they are doing – no matter how much you might dislike the person or his political affiliations.
