The City of Johannesburg has experienced a three year setback under the DA-led Coalition Government who claimed easy victories.

Speaking at a Media Briefing on service delivery this morning, Executive Mayor of Johannesburg, Cllr. Geoffery Makhubo said he spent the last month on a road-show visiting the various departments and entities of the City to assess performance.

“Today I can safely say that the claim by my predecessor and his party that ‘Where we govern, we govern better’ is definitely not true and a farce in the City of Johannesburg.

“Today we can confirm with certainty that the DA-led administration in the City of Johannesburg has brought the City to near financial collapse and created an environment where maladministration bordering on fraud and corruption has thrived,” said Mayor Makhubo.

Mayor Makhubo revealed that at the time of the briefing he had left the City’s Budget Lekgotla that is currently underway to consider the adjustment budget and discussing the 2020/21 budget principles and priorities of the new Government of Local Unity (GLU).

He said these include good governance, financial sustainability, integrated human settlements, job creation, sustainable environmental development and a safer city amongst others.

He blames the City’s state that was in a blink of collapse to populist policies and decision-making that has rendered the City dysfunctional in many critical areas of service-delivery.

Mayor Makhubo said the purpose of today was to specifically focus on key and immediate threats, particularly in the Emergency Services, Johannesburg Metro Police and on the insourcing of security officers in the city.

He revealed that in the Emergency Management Services department, the City currently has five fire-engines to service 5-million residents of Johannesburg.

He said this is despite an amount of R 172 million having been paid upfront to a service provider, in contravention of the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA), for the delivery of fire engines.

“To make matters worse, the specifications upon which this corrupt procurement was made, do not meet the operational requirements of the EMS. To date, not a single fire engine has been delivered to the City.

“The nineteen auxiliary services vehicles delivered do not meet the specifications of the EMS and are currently being retrofitted, at an additional and unbudgeted cost of R 48 million, to suit the requirements of EMS,” said Mayor Makhubo.

He acknowledged that insourcing was a Council resolution taken in January 2018 to insource security officers. However, as the GLU they have found some serious irregularities in the process of insourcing. 

“The targeted number of officers to be insourced were 2, 910. These are officers who at date of decision were employees of a security company and deployed to the City. Currently, we have insourced 5, 021 security officers. 2, 110 more officers than targeted.

“The additional 2, 110 people employed under the guise of insourcing were illegally recruited and smuggled into the City’s employ without any valid and legal process of employment,” said Mayor Makhubo.

He said this was the abuse of the City’s processes to meet party political ends and to create a sitting constituency whose task was to maintain the status-quo in governance.

Mayor Makhubo revealed that preliminary investigations have brought to light serious violations of the MFMA, SCM processes and as a result the fleet contracts account for the high irregular expenditure in the city over the last two years.

He also assured Joburg residents that corruption and maladministration will not go unpunished, “We have acted against two senior officials who are on suspension pending a disciplinary process,” concluded Mayor Makhubo.

 

Issued by the City of Joburg