The ANC is pulling out all the stops to win back battleground metros it lost in the 2016 municipal elections, including in Johannesburg.
The ANC, DA and the EFF have delivered their election manifestos and election promises to residents of the municipalities in a bid to win votes ahead of the polls.
Sowetan spoke to the ANC regional treasurer and current Johannesburg mayor Mpho Moerane on how the party planned to deal with some of the burning service delivery issues in the economic hub.
The ANC in government had devised the Inner City Regeneration Charter, which projected the elimination of dilapidated and hijacked buildings by 2015. Moerane blames the failure of this project on the refusal of owners of the affected buildings to rehabilitate them or allow the city to take control of them.
“As the city we can do much even now, but we need the owners of the buildings to come on board so that we can deal with some of the problems, including the eviction of those who occupy them, some of them being illegal immigrants,” Moerane said.
He said the party aimed to work with law enforcement and the provincial government in ensuring that inner city buildings were cleared for redevelopment through public-private partnerships to resemble Jewel City, a redeveloped residential area near Maboneng.
“Jewel City is the future of Johannesburg and how it must look. We will work with developers to ensure that this happens,” he said.
He said people would have to be stopped from putting up stalls wherever they wanted to and that there would be designated areas for informal traders.
Moerane said while the ANC was committed to providing houses to residents, it would increase the capacity of the city’s anti-land invasion unit in a bid to fight against land grabs.
“We cannot allow people to grab land as they wish. We know that there is a huge housing backlog and both the use of the inner city buildings and the availing of some of the land belonging to the city will help us deal with the human settlements challenge,” he said.
He said newly erected informal settlements had to be eradicated as they undermined sustainable development of the city.
“We need to remove them and build proper houses there. This is not a shanty town. We cannot turn Johannesburg into a favela [slum].”
Moerane said the release of serviced stands as well as the building of mega human settlements projects led by the provincial government was the ultimately viable way of dealing with the housing problem.
The DA coalition in 2017 scrapped Jozi@Work, an initiative which saw the ANC administration set aside more than R3bn for township co-operatives and small companies, as it accused it of being a vehicle aimed at benefiting “ANC cadres and associates”.
Moerane said the party would be bringing back the controversial initiative as it had helped ensure that many residents were given opportunities.
“It is coming back and we are going to double it up. Co-production is the only way to create jobs,” he said.
He added that while the ANC wanted to improve conducive conditions for investment to enable job creation by the private sector, the party wanted the municipality to create direct job opportunities to confront poverty and unemployment.
Since the ANC-led coalition took over in 2019, Moerane said the city had already created 5,000 direct jobs.
Moerane said the ANC was concerned about the city’s inability to run ambulance services for residents as its licence to do so expired a few years ago.
“We have the ambulances but the provincial health department has not renewed our licence. We are still negotiating with them to renew it,” he said.
He blamed the DA-led government under former mayor Herman Mashaba for the city’s failure to renew the licence.
“He did not renew it because he was not co-operating through intergovernmental relations. We believe that when we come back we will be able to forge unity and make sure that we work with the province well,” he added.
Moerane said the ANC would go ahead with its current plan under the coalition government to buy an additional 20 fire engines to increase the capacity of the city’s emergency services, even though there were still other fire engines that had been procured by the DA-led administration.
“There was money spent on fire engines by the previous administration but many were not delivered. We have now agreed with the company that they will deliver these engines,” he said.
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