Mayor delivers final State of the City Address

EKURHULENI Mayor Mondli Gugubele delivered his final State of the City Address (SOCA) for this term of office before the upcoming local government elections in August.

And depending on whether or not the ANC wins Ekurhuleni once more, this will be Gungubele’s last speech as mayor.

The address was delivered at the Tsakane Stadium on Wednesday morning last week.

The theme for this year’s SOCA was “Strengthening Social Maturity by Advancing Social Cohesion in Pursuit of a Prosperous and, therefore, a Liveable, Delivering and Sustainable City”.

Gungebele also announced the new city design through corridor development to grow the metro’s economy and create jobs. He outlined the three corridors of development to drive the economy of the city in areas such as logistics, manufacturing, education, trade, construction and hospitality.

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“The approach of building a new city and an identity means that a significant proportion of this administration’s time was vested in the development of spatial development frameworks. This new city design has led to the conceptualisation of an effective way to reconfigure our urban spaces and economic centres along three key functional economic corridors,” Gungubele said.

Gungubele reflected on the metro’s achievements in the past five years, which include being the first ANC-led metro in the country to receive back-to-back clean audits for the years 2013/14 and 2014/15, receiving the Blue Drop Award three years in a row as well as being Africa’s first aerotropolis.

Turning to the financial management of the city, the mayor highlighted the metro’s revenue collection efforts which include introducing revenue enhancement projects such as the e-Siyakhokha online payment system, which has collected over R1.4-billion since its inception in 2011.

He also touched on the service delivery programme for the past five years which saw all townships now having their own fire stations, the roll-out of free Wi-Fi to 900 hot spots, the introduction of e-Health in 40 clinics (to shorten waiting time and remove the need to open files if your details are on the system) as well as investing over R2.7-billion in roads and storm-water infrastructure.

Since 2011, 27 695 homes were provided with electriciy and almost 7 000 street lights were installed throughout the city. An average of 3 000 flushing toilets a year were installed and clean water to homes increased by an additional 2 685 households.

“In pursuit of providing decent housing to all our people, 14 781 houses were built between 2011 and 2016. In the current financial year, with the available funding provided by the Provincial Government, we are already building 471 houses out of a projected target of 526.

“The call centre continues to be a single point of contact for residents to report service interruptions; the Harambee bus service is on track to roll out in July in Tembisa, our CDBs are kept clean through the Inner City Night Cleaning programme and clean neighbourhood Fridays continue.

“We have introduced world-class mechanical street sweepers to clean and disinfect our streets at night with the programme having being rolled out in Kempton Park, Boksburg and Germiston, Bedfordview, Brakpan, Alberton, Edenvale, Springs and Benoni already.”

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The city has also completed the conceptualisation of the Unified Command Centre (UCC). The facility will contain a centralised customer care centre for both life-threatening and non-life threatening emergencies, and command and control centres for energy, water and the metro police. Core services such as CCTV surveillance of the CBDs and vehicle tracking will also take place at the centre.

He said the work done in the last five years in improving the management of its finances, reporting on service delivery and compliance to legislation was rewarded by two back-to-back clean audits.

In closing, the mayor said he was confident that the ANC government in Ekurhuleni once again demonstrated why it was relevant five years ago and why it remains relevant going forward.

Gungubele concluded: “My heartfelt gratitude goes to the people of Ekurhuleni for continuously supporting our programmes and ensuring that we remain on track as we pursue the quest for a better life for all. Your positive attitude towards government programmes has, over the years, enabled us to do that which you elected us to do.”