- Preventative maintenance to stabilise the electricity supply
- Pressure on ward councillors
- Focus on Tshwane’s 30 critical routes
- Questions and criticism from social media
- Audit outcome for the year ending June 2023
We cannot control the weather, but we are building a stronger ship
This is the first of my new regular newsletter to residents. We are serious about using technology to communicate with residents, including social media, video and audio. We strive to produce thoughtful and meaningful content that is important to you as residents.
Our focus is not so much on responding to individual complaints, but to share information on big picture issues of where our City is going. My view is that if we are not communicating, we are not governing. We want to convey to you our vision of building a capital city that works for all of its people and enable you to follow our progress and to hold us to account.
Wind, lighting and heavy rain caused havoc with the City’s electricity supply in the last week. Trees were uprooted and electricity lines were knocked down. Our response teams are still working day and night to repair the enormous backlog of single electricity outages. To repair an area outage or a large trip is one thing. But single outages stretch the City’s capacity, including personnel, equipment and stocks, to their limit. We have a prioritisation process that works as follows: Area outages affect mass amounts of residents, block outages affect groups of residents and then there are also individual single outages.
As always, ward councillors are under enormous pressure to keep the public updated on our progress. They often face angry and frustrated residents and ward councillors do their absolute best. They place pressure on officials as well as the Executive Mayor. They convey verifiable information to residents. They often follow the dictum of Helen Suzman and see for themselves exactly what is happening, by checking in at substations, pipe bursts and road accidents, even at odd hours of the morning. However, they do not have the power to fix the City instantaneously. Like me, they can only work for its gradual improvement.
We cannot control the weather. But as I have told the City Manager, the City can do a far better job of preventative maintenance. In spring and summer, overgrown branches are one of the biggest reasons for electricity outages. Therefore, the work of trimming branches has to happen before the rainy season.
While the illegal strike hampered preventative maintenance last year, this is only part of the problem.
Preventative maintenance has to be landed in a seasonal programme that becomes a standard operating procedure. This includes trimming branches, cutting grass, cleaning storm water drains and spraying kerbs and pavements with herbicide.
Getting the basics done is part of a change in organisational culture currently underway in the capital city, and which I cover in more detail below. As ever, we can only plead for your patience and commit to keeping you informed.
This is what we try to do with our regular social media updates and media statements by providing updates on service delivery from the ground. This week, like most other weeks, my team and I will join our teams on the ground who are working for you by maintaining cemeteries, fixing potholes and street lights, and marking roads.
We have a focused Urban Management Plan that will prioritise main routes, namely the 30 critical roads that convey residents from home to work and that represent a meeting point for people from different areas. Gradually, we also want to beef up the presence of the Tshwane Metro Police Department (TMPD) on these routes.
The 30 critical routes stretch from Mabopane and Soshanguve to Pretoria North and the inner city, as well as from Atteridgeville, Pretoria East, Mamelodi to Centurion. This focus does not mean that other routes will not be attended, but focusing on the critical routes is a way of maximising impact, productivity and performance. Control of critical routes is also a key to effective municipal policing.
Most people who comment on these posts have positive and encouraging messages. Many ask: When are you coming to my area? Others claim that service delivery only happens in townships, or only in suburbs, or that Pretoria North is neglected in favour of Centurion, or ask when the Mayor is coming to Centurion? The answer is that I have been to all of these places, and I continue to go to each of them. Our mission call is to build a capital city that works for all of its people.
This mission requires us to build a service delivery “machine” that works even when the Executive Mayor is not personally inspecting it (although I believe that constant inspection is part of my job). And so, we have appointed new senior management in all the critical positions, from finance to infrastructure, support services, internal audit, TMPD and emergency services. A change of management does not guarantee a change of culture, but without a change of management, a change of culture is impossible.
In the coming week, we expect to receive the City’s audit outcome for the 2023/24 financial year, which is the year that ended on 30 June 2023. The City received an adverse audit outcome for the previous year ending June 2022. The finding sent shockwaves through the City and our politics, but it was not produced in one single year. Instead, it reflected the breakdown of systems and controls over many years, including information that was deliberately withheld from the municipal Council by City officials.
When I was elected as Executive Mayor in March 2023, I made it clear that a positive audit outcome following the adverse finding was not possible. The extent of the Auditor-General’s findings were just too many and complex to fix in the three months that were left of the financial year. The best we could hope for was an improvement in the adverse audit and positive feedback from the Auditor-General in that the City is actively addressing its issues. The real test would be for this financial year, the year ending June 2024, when an unqualified audit outcome would be essential.
In the meantime, a lot of work has been done, especially to fix two of the three major Auditor-General findings: Cash flow and trade payables (the money paid to creditors). We have a new Chief Financial Officer as well as new systems and controls to manage money going out, as well as money coming in. Our goal is not compliance, but to ensure maximum accountability and procure maximum value for the money spent on residents’ behalf. But a lot of work still needs to be done to respond to the Auditor-General’s findings, especially on keeping book of City assets.
To draw from a metaphor used by Flip Buys, the leader of the Solidarity movement and a resident of Tshwane: We cannot control the storm, but we can build a strong ship. That is our determination too. Next week, I will focus on the most important project to secure the City’s future: Our financial rescue mission, the specifics of the mission and who will be responsible for executing its different parts.