District mayor worried about wayward drivers
KING Cetshwayo District Mayor
Thami Ntuli has ordered management responsible for dispatching water tankers to ensure each vehicle is marked numerically to prevent any criminal activities, such as selling of water to communities.
Ntuli made this request during the draft IDP/Budget Roadshow held at the Melmoth sport field on Tuesday.
“Marking our water tankers would make it easier for whistle-blowers to give us proper identification of a tanker selling water to the community,” he said.
“It would be very easy to report this to us because they can just take a picture of a water tanker bearing that unique identification number, such as
KCDM 01, and send it to us.
“It would be then easy for us to know who was driving that vehicle on that specific day. I made this suggestion before, and I do not know why it has not been implemented.
“I must mention that I don’t like the use of water tankers because they do not deliver water daily to the same ward. Some of our drivers are not honest, they sell water to the community. Other capsize these trucks and while the truck is off the road, people do not get water.
“I don’t know if they faced consequences of their bad driving or not but in my view, capsizing a truck is the result of bad driving [and] gives the impression there is something wrong with the driver. These are some of the problems were are facing.
“I hate it when I see an employee neglecting his responsibility, driving around with a municipal vehicle indulging in alcohol instead of fixing broken pipes,” he added.
“We are all aware of the challenges caused by ageing infrastructure, and is the reason we invested a lot of money to resuscitate broken infrastructure,” he said.
He added that his municipality worked hard to reduce water supply costs, as they stopped using private contractors.
“We bought our water tankers. We also stopped using independent contractors to maintain and fix our infrastructure because we were paying too much. We used to pay R14-million monthly, now were are paying about R4-million,” he said.