Residents raise their hands for Jozi@Work opportunities

 

Hundreds of Johannesburg residents in Region G on Thursday showed their eagerness to roll up their sleeves and get down to work when they packed the Zakariyya Park Community Hall in Lenasia South, in southern Johannesburg, to the brim for a Jozi@Work information-sharing session.

 

The Jozi@Work Programme is a City of Johannesburg’s mayoral initiative aimed at tackling poverty, unemployment and inequality.

 

The programme seeks to create an opportunity for cooperatives at community level to take over the City’s service delivery responsibilities, including refuse removal, grass-cutting, greening and landscaping initiatives, building and maintenance of roads, assisting City Power customers with electricity-related issues, cleaning and management of facilities, to name a few.

 

The City has in its 2014-2015 Budget made available more than R1 billion for cooperatives delivering services across nine different areas of work under the Jozi@Work Programme.

Already six information-sharing sessions on the programme have been held in Region G – which includes areas such as Orange Farm, Ennerdale, Lenasia and Eldorado Park. The last one will be held at the Don Mateman Hall in Eldorado Park on Tuesday September 30.

By popular demand, City officials and political leaders were due to return to Orange Farm on Friday September 19 for another set of presentations after many of the residents pleaded with them to come back as they had missed out on the earlier session because of a variety of reasons.

 

At the Zakariyya Park session, where the hall was packed to the rafters, City of Johannesburg Member of the Mayoral Committee for Corporate and Shared Services, Cllr Mally Mokoena, who also plays an oversight role on Region G, encouraged residents to get involved in the programme so they could be empowered.

She said she was pleased that the session had been well-attended.

One of the City’s presenters, Bongani Mabuse, said what was critical about the Jozi@Work Programme was that it was not “a handout but a hand-up” initiative as the City wanted to help those who “raised their hands”.

He said the time for offering handouts was long gone.

The residents actively and enthusiastically took part in the meeting, asking the panellists poignant and crucial questions.

The winding up of the information-sharing sessions at the end of September in Region G will be followed by the registration of cooperatives in mid-October.

Mabuse emphasised during the roadshow that only eligible cooperatives would be allowed to register and benefit from the programme.