How to alienate ratepayers

LAST week mayor Athol Trollip appeared on The Mayor’s Minute on AlgoaFM.

I applaud the initiative by AlgoaFM – I am not sure if other radio stations do the same thing.

However, I was both disgusted and annoyed by two utterances the mayor made.

A question had been posed by a listener about overflowing reservoirs and the waste of water.

Trollip confirmed the problem and continued to take to task, on open radio, the manager for not fixing the problems. Trollip was “very annoyed” with the manager despite the numerous e-mails sent to the manager to rectify the problem.

Granted, the manager was not named, but to publicly castigate a member of your staff is poor management skills to say the least. There is no doubt that those in the department concerned knew who Trollip was talking about.

The second incident was when a listener questioned the continual dark streets where street lights had not worked for quite some time.

Trollip then castigated the listener by saying the listener should not complain about street lights not working as there were many townships which did not have street lights. Wow! How to alienate your ratepayers! We are all aware of the suffering of the inhabitants. However, as ratepayers for services, which the DA claims to be better at than the ANC, we expect a reaction such as, “We will see what we can do”.

Possibly Trollip should get some good manners education.