DURBAN - I agree with Eric Bell’s letter in Monday’s Mercury, all except for his disapproval of mayor Gumede’s trip to the UK to receive awards for service excellence while the municipality is in disarray.
I saw the awards as something that was meant to encourage her to shape up and live up to her responsibility as mayor of Durban.
Change direction, use zero based budgeting and put an end to the ongoing waste of public money on so many ill-conceived fruitless and wasteful schemes. It’s not like the municipality had only changed for the worst under her guidance.
Let’s not kid ourselves, the city should not get involved in make-work projects because projects of that kind always end with more people being unemployed later on as an unintended consequence than were hired for the make-work project to begin with.
Furthermore, those who were unemployed turn out to be the skilled and educated whereas those given jobs in make-work projects were the unskilled and uneducated.
For example, years ago the city got rid of its fleet of vacuum truck street cleaners which not only swept the streets but also sucked up leaves on the verges and replaced those skilled workers with thousands of unskilled, uneducated labourers who did the same job but over a longer period and at a much higher cost. Replicate that kind of make-work project within the city over and over and the cost of running the city increases to the extent where residents and businesses have to be financially penalised in order to balance the city’s increasing budget.
Because of the higher cost of doing business, small shops, businesses and factories either have to move out of the municipality or shut down, making their staff unemployed.
The fewer businesses you have, the higher pressure to raise income for the municipality, again leading to more shops, businesses and factories to either move or close. Our badly-run municipality is destroying the economy within its boundaries and encouraging all social evils, including anarchy, to flourish unchecked.
Just listen to vehicles red-lining their engines on city streets and the M4 every weekend from Friday to Sunday night.
Metro police who even live in the area don’t even make a plan to stop them, yet the city focuses on building 13 or so Struggle-hero statues for the M4 instead.
Somewhere along the line eThekwini completely lost its sense of purpose and of what it supposed to be doing for its businesses and residents.
In his letter, Eric Bell painted a not so pretty picture of eThekwini.
The waste and corruption is still going on but it also carries forward the on-going financial burden left behind from previous mayors’ failed pet projects.
The eThekwini Billing System is one such monster. Authorised and assigned to amateurs, it has now cost eThekwini close to R1 billion and the system is still struggling with all its valid complaints over monthly electricity bills.
It’s about time for eThekwini to shape up! If an average outside person can see these as fruitless and wasteful expenditures, why can’t caring city officials also see and stop them?
For transparency, the city should start weekly sessions where city officials explain what they are currently up to and ending with answering off-the-floor questions from concerned citizens and reporters?
Does it take a Ratepayers Association’s representative with veto power on all expenditures to sit in council to stop the waste of public money? That’s what the mayor is supposed to do isn’t it?