The Plastics recycling factory, a signature project of the West Rand Development Agency, has not produced any plastic pellets since February owing to cable theft during the first week of February.
The cable still has not been replaced and the factory has been closed since the incident.
An inspection by DA councillors of the West Rand District Municipality revealed that the factory was closed and there were no signs of activity. The production staff does not report for duty and the management visits the factory only occasionally.
Dennis Pretorius, the chairperson of the WRDM DA Caucus says that the DA has raised the issue in Council for the past few months and that he has submitted various letters to the Municipal Manager and the Executive Mayor but there has been no reaction.
The Mayor is currently in America and Councillor Pretorius could get no response from anybody except confirmation that the cable still had not been replaced.
Councillor Pretorius feels that it borders on criminal neglect by the Board of the West Rand Development Agency and the Executive Mayor (as the representative shareholder) to have allowed this delay in installing a new cable. If this happened in a business heads would have rolled by now.
Pretorius said this is proof that Government cannot run a business properly – it is not able to react to a crisis like this. It does not have the skills and is bogged down by bureaucratic inefficiencies.
Pretorius claims that the Development Agency has yet to run a project successfully, and the shareholder – the WRDM – has been too weak to take the necessary action. Despite several undertakings to turn the agency around, the black hole is just getting deeper and the budget is getting bigger and bigger. The Mayor seems to be hell-bent on throwing money at the problem instead of solving the problem with strong resolve.
The DA will report on the other projects of the WRDA in the next few weeks.
