Picture: Supplied
The Thusong community centre in Mamelodi that was closed for several weeks, has reopened for business.
This after DA MPL Mamelodi West constituency head Fred Nel’s visit to the community service centre on Wednesday morning.
The closure of the community centre has caused great distress to residents who rely on services offered there.
“The DA calls on the unlawfully deployed Tshwane administrators to ensure that residents of Mamelodi have better access to municipal services,” Nel said.
He said the only operational Thusong service centre in the area had adequate staff and proper working systems.
The DA visited the centre on Wednesday as part of its overall campaign to pressurise the illegal administrators to improve service delivery in Mamelodi.
Angry residents queuing outside the centre complained that the systems being offline was a regular occurrence.
Nel said it did not help that the centre was Covid-19 ready with the necessary protocols in place when there were no cashiers on-site and customers had to walk to the local mall to pay their utility service bills.
“The centre is the only place where residents can report general service delivery issues and deal with the municipality on a face-to-face basis.”
A similar centre in Stanza Bopape in Mamelodi East has been closed due to security reasons.
“The initial purpose of the Thusong centre was to strengthen service delivery in communities,” said Nel.
“The DA will ensure that the Mamelodi Thusong centre does not become a white elephant like all the other failed ones countrywide under ANC control.”
The DA also said that meter readers were failing the residents of Mamelodi.
“Many accounts are being estimated, causing inflated accounts that anger residents.
“No accounts are currently going out, which has caused a drop in payment rates by account holders in Mamelodi,” he said.
Other challenges experienced in Mamelodi were major issues with regular and lengthy electricity outages, poor repair response times and a lack of infrastructure maintenance to such an extent that violent protests erupted last week.
“The DA calls on the unlawful Tshwane administrators to urgently reinstate a cashier service at the Mamelodi customer care centre, reopen the Stanza Bopape customer care centre and beef up security there, upgrade the Nellmapius customer care centre to provide better access to municipal services and restore electricity supply and electricity maintenance in Mamelodi.
“Residents of Mamelodi have been without electricity for weeks, with no intervention from the city of Tshwane’s unlawfully deployed administrators.
“With this key community centre closed, residents have been left with nowhere to go,” Nel said.
This article first appeared on Rekord East and has been republished with permission.
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