Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Ekurhuleni Metro is in a "hell of a state"

19 April 2011

 DA Caucus Leader in Ekurhuleni, Clr Eddie Taylor, has accused the ANC of being incapable of delivering and maintaining basic services reliably to the community, which came in reaction to the mayor's state of the city address.


DA Caucus Leader in Ekurhuleni, Clr Eddie Taylor, has accused the ANC of being incapable of delivering and maintaining basic services reliably to the community, resulting in residents having to live with raw sewage in their streets, broken street lights, blocked storm-water drains and clinics that run out of medicine.

Taylor reacted to the mayor's state of the city address on Wednesday, April 13 by saying that the Ekurhuleni was in "hell of a state" as a result of mismanagement by the Council.

"To worsen matters the ANC's inability to manage its relationship with the unions has exacerbated the situation," Taylor said.

"It was therefore no surprise when Mayor Mondli Gungubele started his Sate of the City Address by admitting defeat.

"He not only admitted that the Metro has been slow in reacting to disasters, assisting residents with service delivery failures and that its call centre is unresponsive, but conceded that the Metro was having trouble dealing with infrastructure and other backlogs."

"While he used a host of excuses to justify these service delivery failures, from aging infrastructure to land shortages, the bottom-line is the ANC has had 10 years to address these problems since the creation of the Metro.

"Gungubele called on residents to be patient, but residents' patience is running out."

Taylor questioned why the ANC was so singularly incapable of maintaining routine services.

"The metro can build a library but they cannot keep a decent stock of books; the metro can build a new clinic but medicines run out; the metro build new roads but existing roads are allowed to turn into potholes; the metro work in municipal buildings that they don't keep clean and they don't repair the toilets,"

He added that in part the ANC's inability to maintain services was the result of the attitudes of municipal workers having deteriorated and work processes being badly managed.

 "Employees see that their seniors and the ANC political leadership have little concern for the residents they are supposed to serve and emulate these attitudes.

"I have warned the City Manager and the Mayor many times about the ineffectiveness of the silo mentality prevalent in the municipal structure but little corrective action has been taken to fix the problem. If work ethics are strong any structure can be made to work but a mix of bad attitudes, and an ineffective organisational structure are a disastrous combination and that is what we have in Ekurhuleni."

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