Use money for maintenance projects

DAVID Hamer’s letter, “Stick to sphere of responsibility” (March 22), and Gerard’s “Spend money on projects and not on splashy events” (March 27) have highlighted something that has been around for a long time and seems to be continuing under the present coalition.

In the front page article, “Bay water crisis dips to ‘disaster’ status” (March 27), the municipality admits that it only reduced leaks by 1.2% between December and January, and that the amount of water losses and wastage amounted to 31.6% of all water consumed in January.

Besides that Walter Shaidi, head of infrastruc- ture and engineering, admits that there was no funding to employ 300 plumbers to allocate five plumbers to each ward to implement plans to curb water wastage and leaks.

These damning facts indicate that from the mayoral committee downwards there has not been proper management of the crisis from the beginning and somewhere in the system there appear to be lame ducks who are not helping the problem.

Not having funds is a feeble excuse when one compares this with the amount being spent on the metro police, a less critical area, which in any event does not seem to be working very well, considering what is happening on our roads daily.

What a cheek to make out as though we ratepayers and residents are the real bad guys when it comes to water loss.

To my mind this country would have had ample funds for infrastructure maintenance and other core projects and responsibilities, especially at local government level, if we still had only four provinces, and no executive mayors and mayoral committees. And of course no corruption.

Mike, Port Elizabeth