Joburg capital expenditure increases to R10.8bn

Some people wanted to pretend that no delivery had taken place in Johannesburg in the past 21 years. But they were misleading the public, executive mayor Parks Tau said yesterday.

The delivery record spoke for itself, he said outlining elements of the city’s end-of-term report for 2011 to 2016. Johannesburg was a R78 billion-asset local government entity that accounted for 14% of the national economy. Capital expenditure had increased from from R3.7 billion in 2011-12 to R10.8 billion in 2014-15.

“Our financial soundness further saw the city facilitate over R8 billion [in] local investments,” he said.

Many residents were already benefitting from the roll-out of the free City of Johannesburg WiFi which they use for, among others, homework, studies and job assignments. The city delivered and continued to deliver basic services to all residents, including those who live in informal settlements.

“It is certainly not a secret that Johannesburg is leading with the development of integrated settlements such as Lufhereng, Fleurhof, Cosmo City, Kliptown and Lehae.

“Johannesburg is a city that listens when its residents speak, and over the ending term, we have installed 1 258 remote monitoring units at priority traffic signal intersections to be able to improve our turnaround time in attending to faulty or damaged traffic signals.”

Tau said the city had upgraded 930 traffic signal controllers and 811 traffic signal intersections to South African roads traffic signs manual requirements.

“Already 1 900km of roads have been resurfaced, and we have upgraded roads in deprived areas that include Orange Farm, Ivory Park, Diepsloot, Doornkop, Braamfischerville, Thulani, Drieziek, Slovoville, Kaalfontein and Mayibuye.”

Tau said the city had made significant strides in bringing about socio-economic transformation for its residents through developmental programmes such as Jozi@Work and the youth initiative, Vulindlel’ eJozi.

Johannesburg had created 200 000 job opportunities using the Expanded Public Works Programme. It also had contracted more than 1 100 cooperatives and other community-based companies for Jozi@Work.

– news@citizen.co.za