Dear executive mayor, when I heard you were cycling in the cycle challenge my heart warmed.
I spent time cycling the streets of Joburg, and a lot of my time was spent reflecting on how the City is being run from a service delivery point of view. I didn’t have to look far to see the shortcomings of the simplest of tasks that your administration and entities are failing to do.
Not for a lack of trying to have as many issues as possible logged – either by myself, by many of the active residents’ associations, a fulltime ward inspector based in Region B, and a regional office dedicated to service delivery – the majority of issues raised with the City just do not get addressed (or they do, but only after numerous requests or a tough-love approach).
Executive mayor, let me ask you, did you see what I saw? Are issues that the regional urban inspectors log receiving any attention? And did any of the regional urban inspectors take to the route (even in car) to ensure that the City entities were attending to issues along the route in the run-up to the big day? Will you be logging any of the faults you saw for resolution? And will you cycle the route again to check if what you logged was, in fact, resolved?
If there was a prize for the worst-performing entity related to service delivery along the cycle route, the Johannesburg Roads Agency would get first prize.
