This isn’t the end of my involvement – Mashaba

The outgoing mayor of the City of Johannesburg Herman Mashaba said retiring from the mayoral position will not be the end of his involvement with community projects.

Although he has plans to focus on his businesses, Mashaba said his concern about building a country that we can all be proud of will never change, and he is determined to keep monitoring the projects he started and assisting in the city.

“I am looking forward to engaging with the communities as an ordinary citizen of the city, because what is being done will always impact me as a member of the community,” Mashaba said.

Speaking at Randburg where he was launching the new Roosevelt Park substation, Mashaba said the substation was one of his first projects in the city where he saw the community getting involved and coming together to fix the electricity crisis.

“After I heard on the radio about the protest, I decided to engage with residents. I knew it was going to be impossible to fix it overnight but we gave it our best attention,” he said.

Mashaba said the R133 million Roosevelt Park substation upgrade was completed within a given budget and will be able to provide greater redundancy and stability for the network for the next 40 years.

He was joined by City Power Chief Executive Officer Lerato Setshedi, MMC of Environment and Infrastructure service Nico De Jager and councillor David Hensman.

He praised his team for working hard in fighting corruption and turning Johannesburg around.

“Every time I went to the council meeting I was attacked about the non-compliance of City Power, but I knew that time will tell and today I am standing in front of you about the achievement of City Power. It was one of the most corrupt entities where some of the entries on my balance sheet were not even in existence,” Mashaba said.

Mashaba told the community that he was tired of working with corrupt people who do not understand the purpose of being a public servant.

“I always made it clear to all the people I worked with that I am not in this job to make friends with corrupt people,” he said.

Mashaba said the past three years of hard work and sleepless nights were very brutal, yet it was the most rewarding job he could have ever done.

Northcliff councillor Beverley Weweje said the support and patience of the community even during outages encouraged workers to focus on the project.

“We had constant outages at least twice a week and it was affecting the economy. Now we are glad because the project has the capacity for more developments,” Weweje said.

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the project was also used to empower 56 engineering students with skills.

– news@citizen.co.za

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