Jozi@Work brings hope to Poortjie community

11 February 2016

 

The community of Poortjie, a few kilometres outside Orange Farm in the City of Johannesburg’s Region G, is set to benefit from contracts made possible by the City’s jozi@work programme.

 

Poortjie is one of the most impoverished areas in the metropolis. Life feels so hollow and depressing here that even young, resourceful and enterprising car washers spend most of their time dozing off at their work stations because business is so slow.

Half-stocked spaza shops – at least those that are still operational – reflect the hopelessness that has enveloped the area. There is not enough money circulating in the community, the result of grinding poverty and high levels of unemployment.

“Business is bad, my broer,” says spaza shop-owner Bongani Mthimkulu. It has been five years since Mthimkulu lost his job as a scooter driver for a furniture shop in Vereeniging.

Opening the spaza shop was his only option to eke out an honest living. But things are a lot harder than he had initially thought. So, when he heard from one of his customers that City of Joburg officials would be visiting the area on Tuesday February 9 to present a number of work packages under Executive Mayor Councillor Parks Tau’s R3-billion Jozi@Work programme, the 30-year-old father of two vowed he would not miss the briefing for the world.

He made sure he was among the first to arrive so he could secure a front row seat. He wanted to hear each and every word from all the presentations that would be made.

Jozi@Work is an initiative through which the City of Johannesburg seeks to empower small township businesses and co-operatives by giving them contracts to undertake work such as street sweeping, garbage collection, grass cutting, gardening, to mention a few. Unfortunately for Mthimkulu, he had not registered his business to enable him to tap into the opportunities on offer on that day.

But officials told him not to worry as the City offered free assistance to those who had not yet registered their entities for the Jozi@Work programme.
Instead of walking away in despair, Mthimkulu stayed on. Brimming with excitement, he listened attentively and took notes as the facilitators made their presentations.

A lump formed in his throat when Johannesburg Water, the City’s water and sanitation provision entity, offered local companies two work packages for maintenance and painting. Maintenance work would involve the installation, repair and replacement of existing communal standpipes and taps. The second work package was for cleaning, painting and labelling of valve chambers, among other services.

The closing date for the two work packages is February 29, which means Mthimkulu – who said he would register a company almost immediately after the briefing session – is in a race against time. But this did not dampen his spirits.

“If my registration documents don’t arrive in time for me to bid for these work packages, I will wait for the next opportunity. There must be more where these two work packages come from,” he said.

What also impressed him most about Jozi@Work is that preferred bidders do not necessarily have to have their own tools to carry out the work – all they need to do is to demonstrate their ability to do it.The Capability Support Agency (CSA) has been established to provide support to successful bidders and oversee and monitor their work. Poortjie bidders whose expressions of interest will score the most points will carry out the work over four months –from 1 March to June 30.

As for Mthimkulu, Jozi@Work has given him hope that, quoting Executive Mayor Tau, “tomorrow will be better than today”. He is keeping his fingers crossed that one day he will land one of the work packages.

“This is very encouraging. The Mayor is on to a good thing here,” Mthimkulu said.

Poortjie sprang up about 25 years ago when corrugated iron shacks started mushrooming on what used to be a highly productive farm. Today a significant number of residents in this windswept neighbourhood of 25 000 people are proud beneficiaries of RDP houses – complete with flushing inside toilets. To a first-time visitor to the area, however, it is immediately evident that though much has been done to improve the living conditions of the people – there are two schools, a community centre and a hall – more drastic measures will have to be taken to comprehensively transform the settlement.

Untarred roads and an endless sea of tin shacks define the area. Poverty and unemployment abound.