Speaker’s office ‘key to communication’

THE office of the speaker is the chief communicator in the municipality and must create an environment where councillors and residents can engage on issues of service delivery.

This is according to Advocate Ernest Chipu, acting head of department in the office of the City of Johannesburg’s speaker, who was in Nelson Mandela Bay yesterday.

He urged councillors and residents to use the speaker’s office when faced with service delivery issues.

Chipu is one of nine delegates from Johannesburg who are on a two-day fact-finding mission as part of an exchange programme under way at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium.

“In the City of Johannesburg we have a petitions policy: communities who have service delivery issues lodge their petitions and grievances [with the speaker’s office],” he said.

With this system, Chipu said, the turnaround time was of the utmost importance.

“In some cases we find that petitions have been standing for a year and people [remain] without water.

“We try to solve this also by taking the council to the people,” he said.

The safety of councillors was a talking point at the meeting, with Chipu attributing this to a lack of a functioning communication system as enraged communities bay for councillors’ blood over service delivery.

“The safety of councillors is one of the speaker’s responsibilities; we have a councillor safety policy that we use when councillors are in distress, mainly during service delivery protests,” Chipu said.

He said ensuring impartiality in the council remained a problem.

“When the speaker sits in council, he presides as a judge.

“He then leaves the cap of his political party, because when they sit in that council they are no longer parties – they are a council with the common interest of service delivery,” he said.

Nimrod Mqulwana, director in Nelson Mandela Bay’s speaker’s office, said the programme was aimed at allowing the two metros to learn from each other.

Whatever the Bay speaker’s office found interesting, he said, would be taken to various committees before it was adopted by the council.

Picture: FREDLIN ADRIAAN SHARING IDEAS: Nimrod Mqulwana, of Nelson Mandela Bay’s office of the speaker, and the Bay’s DA chief whip, councillor Werner Senekal, discuss matters brought up at an exchange programme with Johannesburg officials, held at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium