"The city is taking steps to ensure that every rand in our budget is utilised effectively" - Joburg Mayor
By Neo Poho
After exactly a month taking over as the Johannesburg Mayor, Kabelo Gwamanda delivered his state of the city address on Tuesday morning the 6th of June 2023.
With the city facing a service delivery crisis, poor financial management and disputes between political parties in the past year, Gwananda said coalitions under the Democratic Alliance (DA) have been unstable and are focused only on settling political scores instead of providing service to the residents of the City of Johannesburg.
While the City of Johannesburg has been governed by various coalitions which introduced a new era in the politics and governance of Johannesburg, Gwamanda furthermore reiterated that the city is in the dire state that it is in now because of the unprecedented levels of instability.
"This new political reality has introduced a myriad of challenges both for governance and politics especially under the various DA-led multi-party government that have sought to settle political scores as opposed to serving the residents," said Gwamanda.
While the city is also experiencing financial instability, Gwamanda revealed that he found a “near-bankrupt municipality" with more than R6.6 billion in unpaid supplier invoices.
"Following the tabling of a conceptually flawed budget by the multiparty government and the resultant clandestine management of the city’s finances, the government of local unity found itself in a budget rebasing exercise in the adjustment budget process, and is grappling with finding innovative and financially prudent mechanisms to ensure that service delivery continues.
The reality is that without a financially sound city we will not be able to invest as required in our core municipal mandate of delivering basic services, ensuring the security of electricity and water supply, efficient roads infrastructure and the many other service delivery mandates that demand immediate attention."
Therefore Gwamanda has reassured the residents of the city of Johannesburg that every rand in the budget will be utilised effectively.
With load shedding remaining a huge inconvenience towards the residents and businesses in Joburg, the mayor is adamant that the city will eventually win the battle against load shedding.
"Providing reliable and sustainable power supply to our residents and businesses in the city is one of the foremost priorities of the government of local unity and mitigating the impact of planned outages is a matter that is receiving our urgent attention through City Power.
Since we are facing a huge problem of cable theft in our country, the city of Johannesburg vows to urgently attend to the rampant and increasing cases of vandalism and cable theft," Gwamanda added.
The Al Jama-ah councillor alluded that the city is embarking on a new path that will restore the heartbeat of Johannesburg and make the city work for its residents.
"On this path, we will double our efforts to ensure that potholes are fixed, traffic lights work, grass is cut regularly, and indeed street lights function, we shall not be judged by how many times our actions grabbed the headlines or how often our utterances are deemed worthy of soundbites by the mainstream media.
Rather we will be judged on the basis of one thing and one thing only, how we work every day as a collective to make the lives of the people of Johannesburg better."
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State of the City Address
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