EThekwini mayor says inept managers will be targeted

DURBAN mayor Mxolisi Kaunda has given newly appointed city manager Musa Mbhele three months to produce a turn-around plan that will address the ills that plague the municipality, including cleanliness and worker “laziness”.

Kaunda said senior managers who were failing to perform in their jobs should be removed.

Chief among the issues Kaunda wants to be attended to, is for the city to rid itself of inept senior officials. He said such officials should be sacked or at the very least, be assigned to areas where they would have minimal negative impact on the city’s programmes.

Kaunda was speaking during the rural and township investment summit hosted in Inanda, north of Durban, yesterday. The well-attended summit aims to discuss ways to invest and increase economic activity in rural and township areas. It was hosted at Inanda’s new landmark building, the Octavia Boutique hotel that opened its doors a few months ago.

Kaunda, who has previously raised concerns about the performance of city workers, said in the coming days a meeting would be called with senior management to establish the underlying reasons for poor performance.

That will then be followed by a meeting with the city workers. He expressed great frustration with the levels of performance, saying those who were failing should be sacked from those positions.

“We have 26 000 workers yet the performance is so below par, one could think that we have just 10 000 workers.

“Based on this performance, one has to ask, where are all these workers? Those are the workers that are showing up to work late, they are leaving early to take their kids out of schools and taking them home at midday and never returning to the office, thereby taking time away from their employer. Those are the workers that are sleeping at work,” Kaunda said.

He said the new city manager had been told about the city’s intention to sack employees that under-performed.

Kaunda said it was important that managers were held accountable for service delivery, adding that it was not right that every challenge was dumped at the mayor’s doorstep.

“If the municipality is not performing, people level all sorts of insults against the mayor. If the city is dirty or there is no water, people do not insult the managers of those divisions, they do not know the names of managers in those units and they (public) instead call me this ‘useless mayor’ and now I am saying I want to get rid of all those that are making me (look) useless.”

Kaunda said the labour unions in the city should also play a role in ensuring that the city’s performance and productivity were improved.

“They should have a stake in ensuring that productivity and increments go hand in hand, these are matters I have raised with them.”

Speaking on the summit, Kaunda said it was important that such summits had measurable impact, so that “next year when we host another summit we should be able to say this was achieved with this summit”.

Economic Development Committee chairperson, councillor Thanduxolo Sabelo, said there was an urgent need to invest in communities and find ways to ensure that the money stayed within these communities to promote economic growth.