City urged to coordinate its efforts to accelerate service delivery

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 September 8, MMC of Group Corporate and Shared Services, Leah Knott, urged a coordinated approach to service delivery.

She also serves as the political head responsible for citizen relations and urban management.

Also at the meeting were 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 underway in the region include resurfacing the M2 motorway westbound carriageway from New Goch Road to Maritzburg offramp, Booysens sewer pipe replacement project, Bezuidenhout Valley sewer pipe replacement and others.

Knott said she has been doing random service delivery oversight exercises to understand the challenges and monitor service delivery progress in different regions and wards. In some areas, she 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 in service delivery, there is still a long way to go,” she said.

“The Augmented Fields Services (AFS) programme 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,” Knott added.

Councillors raised a variety of service delivery issues in their wards, including high theft of bins, no maintenance and vagrants in parks, a 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 that some officials are not dedicated to their jobs, hence it is crucial to introduce consequence management.

Irene Mafune, Region F’s regional director, said service delivery has improved in most wards since the introduction of the AFS programme. Each ward has a dedicated team that works tirelessly to augment the work done by most entities.

The councillors pleaded with the city to move with speed to address their issues as the region is the gateway of Joburg.