KZN Cogta MEC happy with city’s service delivery
KZN MEC for Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) Sipho Hlomuka says he is pleased with the eThekwini Municipality’s efforts to ensure service delivery for its residents.
This comes after Hlomuka visited the municipality yesterday as part of an integrated service delivery programme that took place in various areas in the south of Durban.
One of the troubling issues, according to Hlomuka, was the city’s inability to collect revenue.
According to the Cogta department, the municipality was one of the most-affected in the province as a result of the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020, which saw a sharp decline in its revenue and cash flow.
As a result, it suffered a loss in revenue of about R3billion and had an 88% collection rate during the 2019/2020 financial year.
The department said that most recently, the municipality’s overall revenue collection had improved to 95% which was the level it was at prior to the lockdown.
The municipality has also come under fire recently due to continuous water outages which left communities without water for days. Some of the outages were due to load shedding.
The department said the municipality’s leadership had come up with a strategy to ensure that water supply was not affected when there was load shedding.
“Water is a scarce resource and (water supply) is one of the critical issues in the whole of KZN, especially here in eThekwini as well. The municipality has also secured Inanda Dam to ensure that even if there is load shedding, communities around Durban are not affected with water provision,” he said.
Hlomuka together with senior management from the department, met with the municipality’s senior management to receive a comprehensive report on the city’s current status.
They also visited the Florence Mkhize front-line service delivery centre to inspect the level of services provided to residents. The department said the visit formed part of the assessments that were being conducted to look into billing and other complaints from ratepayers.
He said the assessment was aimed at identifying the root causes of problems to ensure that the municipality was able to respond to its communities’ needs. Hlomuka added that the eThekwini Municipality could not do everything on its own and that the provincial and national government had a constitutional responsibility to support it.