Mayor visits Olivedale, Sharonlea, Bromhof and other areas in Ward 101
Power outages, bad roads, bushes in need of trimming and litter needing cleaning were attended to at mayor's visit.
It took the visit of the mayor of Joburg to see that Ward 101 would receive the much-needed attention it had been asking for these last few years.
An accelerated service delivery programme saw Mayor Kabelo Gwamanda joined by Region C regional director Mlamleli Belot, Ward 101 councillor Ralf Bittkau and a number of MMCs and department managers from the City of Joburg.
Though the mayor visited various sites of operation on October 11, the programme had started two days before and in some locations, it would take up to two weeks to finish.
After briefing municipal staff, residents, media and other role players at Olivedale Library, the mayor set off at a brisk walk up President Fouché Road to a green space that had been illegally taken over by recyclers. Mounds of plastic were being thoroughly cleared by employees of Citizen Relationship and Urban Management (Crum) with the aid of an excavator and trucks.
The mayor was given a mask and equipment and got his hands proverbially and literally dirty as he helped collect rubbish for removal. In this task, and at others throughout the day, MMC for Development Planning Eunice Mgcina also jumped into action to assist.
While Crum employees were finishing the clean-up – which would take several more hours – Belot then led the group to All Saints Shopping Centre where city entities had set up stands to help residents and share resources with the community for three days.
City Power, the Anova Health Institute, Library and Information Services, Environmental Health, Group Finance and Pikitup were some of the departments assisting residents there. The Group Finance gazebo was the most busy one, with residents trying to have their rates and pension rebates issues sorted out.
Gwamanda and Belot visit each stand and learnt about what they are doing, before going to Sharonlea Primary School, which has had problems with a deteriorating road for years.
The next stop was Golden Harvest Park, where there has been a leak on the sewer servitude, a need for clearing of bushes and trees, derelict illegally occupied houses and illegal connections. Much of this was exposed in articles in the Randburg Sun earlier in the year.
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Low-lying electrical cables needed replacing in Bromhof before the Jacaranda Avenue bridge was visited in Olivedale, where there are blocked pavement inlets, displaced people living illegally on public land, damage to pipes and erosion of river banks.
One of the most important stops was at Hyperion Drive, where residents had protested publicly in numbers on previous occasions due to their prevailing electricity issues.
Finally, a stakeholder engagement took place at Olivedale Library.
Greater Sharonlea Residents Forum chairperson JC Wouters was also able to present a list of further issues to the city. These include traffic lights that have not worked for months, street lights reported but not fixed, roads damaged by water and requiring sub-soil drainage, potholes, asbestos cement pipe replacements, prevailing power outages and lack of communication from City Power.
“While it’s greatly appreciated that they’ve got a programme happening and they’ve given us a forum as a community to raise our issues at mayoral level, we now need that to be filtered down into the relevant departments and those departments need to be held accountable,” Wouters said.
“We are tired of the area being run like this where the only time we get attention is ahead of elections where there is a specialised programme to resolve issues. It shouldn’t be like that.”
Wouters thanked Bittkau for the role he played in pushing the programme coming to the ward specifically.
Bittkau was grateful for what had been done on the day, but lamented the absence of a senior representative from City Power.
The safety of learners improved ‘700-fold’
Bittkau was positively beaming when he saw the resurfacing taking place on Camphers Street, outside Sharonlea Primary School. He, the school, the Greater Sharonlea Residents Forum, and many parents had been complaining to the Joburg Roads agency for years about the state of horror the road had become (more potholes than drivable road, some had said).
“We had been conversing with the roads agency for at least three years,” school governing body chairperson, Lindsay Engelbrecht said. “They would patch up a pothole but it was so poorly done, or the road surface was in such a state already, it would last a short time and form a pothole again. When the rainy season came there were potholes galore.”
He said a camera in the area picked up about 1 400 cars drive into the area between 06:30 and 07:30 every day and the vast majority of these were parents dropping off children. “We have 1 200 learners at the school and it is so unsafe. Drivers are too busy looking at the road trying to avoid potholes they are not looking for children crossing the street. The resurfacing will improve the safety of learners 700-fold.”
Also read: Sharonlea Primary School at its wits end with road problems
About Ward 101
According to information supplied by the city, the ward comprises 15.1km². The population was 35 796 according to Census 2011, with
2 378 people per square km.
The ward consists of many developments, such as townhouses and clusters and this forms most of the residential space.
Due to a lack of a builder’s rubble or garden site in the ward, illegal dumping is prevalent, especially building rubble on vacant properties.
The ward is home to shopping centres, large retail nodes, hospitals and schools.
In terms of Region C, the regional demographics indicate a combination of low, medium and high-income households, with a high number of informal settlements and ‘poverty depravation areas’. The largest population group is between the ages of 18 and 35 and there is a large number of unemployed residents.
The region, and Ward 101 specifically, is conveniently situated and linked by road to leading Gauteng attractions, such as the Cradle of Humankind and Magaliesberg, and the Pilansberg in the North West Province.
The whole region has about 894 000 residents, according to the IHS Markit Regional eXplorer.
