It might take the City of Joburg three years to procure enough electricity to deal with the power crisis in the city.
Speaking to Sowetan this week, mayor Mpho Phalatse, who has been in office for eight months, gave an update on what she has done to address service delivery issues in the city.
Phalatse said her government has prioritised keeping the lights on, giving residents running water and ensuring the city is clean and safe.
She said the relaunch of the A re Sebetseng cleaning programme, Buya Mthetho campaign to recoup money from delinquent ratepayers, collaboration between the metro police department and SAPS to combat theft and vandalism of infrastructure, and the recent energy indaba to deal with the electricity crisis, have helped her administration “get the basics right”.
“The convening of the indaba was to draw a roadmap towards energy security for the city, which includes involvement of independent power producers and green technologies in the energy mix. Work is already under way to procure an additional 500MW of energy over the next 18 to 36 months,’’ she said.
“We have seen a lot of development in terms of clean streets. Pikitup is on the ball and making sure that this is high priority. With the A re Sebetseng campaign we are saying to our communities that we cannot clean your streets alone. We need you to help us. We need to take care of our environment.’’
The housing crisis in Joburg has been another issue that the city has been trying to address.
Phalatse said there is a plan to allocate stands to people who have applied for social housing.
“Our housing waiting list is currently sitting at around 480,000. These are people who are waiting for free houses. We have realised that we are not going to be able to provide for all those free houses because we simply do not have the resources. We rely on National Treasury and the national and provincial human settlements departments to provide us with the resources needed to build these houses.
“We have started giving people serviced stands. It is a very well-received solution where people say give me a piece of land that is electrified, has water, a toilet and I will build my own house. So it is a very exciting development. When we started with my administration we gave out 700 stands in Zandspruit. It is just one phase of a bigger development. We will be doing that in other areas,’’ said Phalatse.
She also said the city is working with the Joburg Property Company to “reclaim hijacked buildings and we hand them over to the private sector for re-development. We have six buildings that are low-hanging fruits''.
Meanwhile, following the death of seven-year-old Khayalethu Magadla, who fell into an open manhole in Soweto, Phalatse said the city has begun a pilot project to install sensors that would detect when manhole covers are being stolen.
“The pilot project on manhole covers will be completed around August and the cost is R10,000 per cover. Joburg Water intends to do this starting with 5% of their manholes,’’ said Phalatse.
The city has 1.3m manholes and conducts 2,500 inspections per day. “We rely on our residents and other stakeholders in the city to report manhole covers that are missing. We currently have 10 sensors that we are piloting but it is a very expensive solution looking at the number of manholes that we have and looking at the cost,’’ said Phalatse.
“We won’t be able to deploy sensors at all our manholes. After Khayalethu’s incident, we actually felt that we should prioritise places like parks which are places that children frequent. It really informed our prioritisation because this particular manhole was never reported to Joburg Water and that is why it was not replaced.”
kokam@sowetan.co.za
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