Mayor Tau leads the way to a cleaner Diepsloot

19 August 2015

 

Johannesburg Executive Mayor Councillor Parks Tau swapped his suit for a yellow Jozi@Work jacket when he led several Gauteng mayors and Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Pravin Gordhan in a cleanup campaign in Diepsloot on Tuesday August 18.

 

The mayors who took part in cleaning up a section of the area in Johannesburg’s Region A included Mondli Gungubele (Ekurhuleni) and Kgosientsho Ramokgopa (Tshwane). The cleanup campaign was a symbolic demonstration of the mayors’ commitment to dirtying their hands to improve the quality of life in their respective municipalities.

 

This followed the launch by Gauteng Premier David Makhura of the Back to Basics initiative at Afrika Tikkun Centre aimed at strengthening service delivery and enhancing economic growth.

 

Mayor Tau was the first to step up to sign the declaration of intent committing the City to improved service delivery and creating conditions to sufficiently grow the economy. Earlier, Mayor Tau had given a brief history of Diepsloot, saying the township came into being in 1994, the same year that South Africa achieved its democracy.

 

He said Diepsloot was a microcosm of the reality of townships established post-1994 and was a direct result of uncontrolled urbanisation following the demise of apartheid.

 

Mayor Tau said the City had in the past 21 years been able to build 12 schools in Diepsloot. The construction of the 13th school is under way. He said there were four clinics, three recreational parks, a fire station, two pedestrian bridges, a youth centre with a library currently being upgraded and a new water reservoir.

 

He announced that 6 000 new housing units would be built soon but was concerned about challenges such as overcrowding, burst water pipes, the flowing of sewage in the streets, to name a few. The Mayor warned of the devastating effects of fraud and corruption.

 

“We need to deal with this scourge of fraud and corruption decisively if we are to live up to the dictates of the Back to Basics approach,” he said.

 

Premier Makhura concurred and called on councillors to help restore the credibility of the government by doing the work they were supposed to do. He said it was unacceptable that after seven to eight years a police station in Diepsloot was still incomplete and further urged communities not to fight over projects that, in many instances, resulted in the delay of service delivery.

 

“Where we are doing a lot of work, like here in Diepsloot, we see residents fighting over projects and create factions, which tend to delay service delivery,” he said.

 

Giving his overview on the state of municipalities in Gauteng, Minister Gordhan said of the province’s 12 municipalities, only two – Westonaria and Randfontein – were found to be at risk, both in terms of their challenges and plans of action. He said of South Africa’s 278 municipalities, 103 had the basics right, 89 were almost dysfunctional and 86 municipalities dysfunctional. He said this showed that a significant amount of work still needed to be done to realise transformed and desired practices.