Vacancies hinder service provision

Municipal departments battle to cope as many posts remain unfilled

SEVERAL Nelson Mandela Bay municipal departments are battling to provide basic services due to posts being left vacant for months, it was revealed at a committee meeting on Friday.

The affected directorates are infrastructure, engineering, electricity and energy.

The directorate for electricity and energy alone had 43 critical vacancies, some of which had been advertised as far back as May. Only two of these vacancies had been finalised and filled by last month.

“The number of unfunded vacancies is very concerning,” committee chairwoman Annette Lovemore said.

“At the municipal depot in Despatch, there is only one artisan employed, but [the report] does not show we need more staff because there is no funding for [these positions].”

Carl Hempel, acting senior director of distribution in the directorate, said some depots struggled with fewer than half the staff members needed. “We cannot deliver the services expected [of us] with this number of staff members,” he said.

Mvuleni Bukula, director of retail and commercial management in the same department, said there were only three people responsible for detecting electrical tampering in 320 000 households.

“We are battling. Our call centre is operating with fewer than nine people, working in two shifts over seven days.”

Even the department responsible for the administration of the recruitment process had too few staff.

“There is a new system for capturing jobs, which meant some vacancies had to be recaptured,” the acting senior director of technical services, Bernhardt Lamour, said.

“There are two women doing the capturing, and if we take [people] from our directorate to help, it creates a hole [in our department].”

Lamour said he would follow up with the human resources department.

Meanwhile, a lack of artisan plumbers has left councillors frustrated.

“We’ve been declared a water disaster area but in the last three months we’ve done nothing,” councillor Charles Garai said.

The directorate for infrastructure and engineering had advertised 79 vacancies in recent months, with 10 of these posts set aside for artisan plumbers.

However, the recruitment process was halted due to negotiations with municipal union Samwu.

“We are grossly in arrears in repairing leaks because we don’t have enough [qualified] plumbers. More leaks are reported every month than we are fixing.”

Lovemore agreed that a report from the executive director, detailing the extent of the metro’s water leaks problems and the progress regarding the appointment of plumbers, had to be presented at the committee’s meeting next month.