Emfuleni blame R65 million overtime bill on shortage of staff and resources

Emfuleni municipality in Gauteng has blamed the whopping R65 million overtime payment to its water entity employees, despite the escalating water and sanitation crisis, on a shortage of staff and resources.

The Citizen has reported how the embattled municipality spent a total of R65,832,014.47 on overtime for Metsi-a-Lekoa employees in the last four financial years despite losing more than half (about 56%) of its water at the annual cost of R500 million.

The entity’s workers pocketed a total of R17,959,165.26 in bonuses for the 2018/2019 financial year, R19,633,849.46 in 2019/2020, R17,637,412.99 in 2020/2021 and R10,601,586.76 in the 2021/2022 financial year.

Under-staffed, no resources  

The municipality’s spokesperson Makhosonke Sangweni explained that Metsi-a-Lekoa has been under-staffed for the past four financial years and teams could not attend to all queries during normal working hours.

“The problem was further compounded by a shortage of working material and vehicles, in a bid to serve our communities teams had no choice but to share the limited resources. When one team worked during normal hours, the next team worked overtime, often sharing vehicles between the shifts,” he said.

Metsi-a-Lekoa is a dedicated water services authority entity which operates and maintains existing water and sanitation infrastructure.

But the municipality’s water and sanitation crisis – that has also seen raw sewerage flowing into the Vaal River for over a decade – has been blamed on the entity.

Metsi-a-Lekoa has also been criticised for a lack of water demand and supply management strategy, which has resulted in millions of rand in clean running water being wasted in leaks.

Intervention

The municipality, which owes Rand Water R1.1 billion, said the entity has received 17 service delivery vehicles rented by Rand Water as part of a resolution taken by cabinet to place the municipality under Section 63 intervention of the National Water Services Act.

Sangweni said this meant the national Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs department effectively took over the Water Services Authority function of the municipality and all its ancillary responsibilities.

He said as a result of this intervention, the Department of Water and Sanitation, as a custodian of all water services, appointed Rand Water as an implementing agency to affect Section 63 intervention objectives.

“With the understanding that the Cabinet decision came at the backdrop of the implementation of Section 139(1)(b) of the constitution by the Gauteng provincial government, the municipality has committed to fully cooperate with the injunction,” Sangweni explained.

He said this was necessitated by the fact that the municipality was in dire need of additional resources and that the municipality welcomed the collective effort that the inter-governmental framework tabled to ensure a total conformance to the intervention process.

“Several processes were initiated under the intervention and the vehicle unveiling forms part of them. The intervention has delivered 17 rented vehicles for three months. The 17 vehicles will be shared amongst the three water depots,” he said.

Vehicles will also be allocated to 12 water teams to contain water losses and have a quicker turnaround time on all water complaints.

According to Sangweni, in order to decisively deal with the vehicle shortage and challenges at Metsi-a-Lekoa, the municipality was planning to procure 35 service delivery vehicles for both water and sanitation sections at Metsi-a-Lekoa.

– siphom@citizen.co.za