CoE clears the air concerning budget, staff and communication

Word of mouth and public meeting disclosures painted a bleak picture of the City of Ekurhuleni’s (CoE) budget, staff dynamics and communication with ward councillors. This led to the investigation of statements made by various DA ward councillors, in particular Ward 15 Clr Amanda Davison.

Davison stated in a recent community meeting via Zoom that the city still suffers from shortages of staff in certain departments and lacks PPE for service delivery needs to be attended to.

She informed her community on February 16 that, among others, the electricity department suffered a budget cut of R90-million. Additionally, it was alleged the city only had sufficient cash flow for the following 15 days.

In reply to the allegations made, Ekurhuleni spokesperson Zweli Dlamini stated: “The CoE is in a sound financial position as it is performing and able to deliver public services to the residents of the city.”

Dlamini said this conclusion is supported by the following:

• The city utilised R922-m of its own generated revenue to finance projects funded by external loans. These funds will be reimbursed after the conclusion of the external borrowings process.
• The city has passed an adjustment budget, focusing on reducing spending on non-essential goods and services, with the aim to build reserves to an estimated level of R100-m.
• The city continues to meet its obligations, with 80 per cent of the invoices received being paid within 30 days as per the requirement of the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA). This was reported in the second quarter of the city’s key performance indicators (KPIs) review.
• The city has honoured the salary increment payment in January 2021.
• All major suppliers, including Eskom and Rand Water, remain up to date. This is evident as there have been no interruptions in service provision to the citizens of the city.

“The pandemic has placed some strain on revenue collection. The lockdown resulted in mass retrenchments and business closures which has put an enormous amount of pressure on the rate payer.” Dlamini argued that this has not resulted in the city being in the red. Despite strict measures placed on credit control, he holds firm that, “the pandemic and its impact on the economy has not affected the city’s financial position and performance, including the ability to render services”.

He said under level five of lockdown, the city instated a work-from-home policy to protect their staff from contracting Covid-19 at work and taking it home. “This drastic reduction of in-office staff initially resulted in a few hiccups as staff members adjusted to the new normal,” Dlamini stated.

“With digital transformation initiatives developed by the city, such as the My Ekurhuleni App, officials have been able to receive service delivery queries in real time and deploy response teams to logged complaints remotely.”

Grass-cutting backlogs

The city was asked to explain the alleged difficulties with staff with their availability or shortfalls in terms of PPE. The questions about the number of staff available, in addition to PPE shortages experienced by certain departments and exactly what kind of PPE staff necessitates ensuring horticultural maintenance, was not addressed by the city as hoped for.
Instead, Dlamini recited the same rhyme relating to heavy rainfall and sunny weather which causes vegetation to thrive. At the same time, he still referred to the festive season causing backlogs, all the way through February and mid-March. (An identical response was published on January 28, page 4, Express.)

ALSO READ: CoE replies to a letter regarding parks maintenance

Electricity supply service

Copious dysfunctional streetlights have many Kemptonians and law enforcement worked up. General visibility is compromised in the need for security and road safety in residential areas and business districts.

Dlamini continued to state the city relies on community reports, in addition to other service interruption alerts platforms such the call centre and mobile CoE app to identify and promptly fix faulty streetlights.

This is where many readers will argue that these platforms prove fruitless as they have reported faulty streetlights and still face a dark street. “However, when streetlights are constantly damaged by the community through vandalism, illegal connections and cable theft, the city finds it difficult to keep up with the high demand to repeatedly fix same streetlights,” he said.

“This is in the context of limited government resources and rotational shift system necessitated by the pandemic. Due to these incidents of vandalism, illegal connections and cable theft, the normal seven-day turnaround to attend to streetlight queries is negatively affected.”

Furthermore, Dlamini said, with limited staff the city prioritises attending to electricity outages, which results in delays in attendances to streetlights.

“Nevertheless, the city continues to conduct regular security patrols and surveillance but this is not sustainable without the resident’s contribution to safeguarding their electrical infrastructure.”

Communication with councillors

Despite issues brought on by the pandemic, limited staff and budget challenges, the city must keep ward councillors informed. This, in turn, keeps restless residents informed.
Express questioned the alleged lack of communication with councillors and why the city would potentially undermine such democratic principles.

Dlamini simply concluded: “Councillors are members of the CoE Council. Furthermore, they serve in Council committees. They are well aware of all the mechanisms of doing oversight over the city’s administration and consequently city officials.”

*Due to the volume of service delivery complaints received by this publication and to ensure consistent and quality feedback from the city, Express is introducing a five-star rating system. The rating is subjected to the CoE’s response to media inquiries sent by the newsroom.

A five-star score will be allocated as follows:

Two stars will equate to all questions answered (either direct or indirect), two stars will equate to the relevancy of answers to questions posed and the remaining star will be attributed to adherence to the deadline for comment.

As Dlamini served in this discord, Express has rated this reply with three stars: two for questions answered, one for answer relevancy and zero for deadline met.

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