Business and Mayor service delivery partnership takes a leap forward

By Craig Kotze
Business and Mayoral initiatives to improve service delivery and revenue generation took a step closer to implementation as business last week held a report-back meeting on its partnership and mobilisation efforts.
The meeting last week at the Emerald Resort Hotel in Vanderbijlpark took place against a background of a deepening financial and service delivery crisis at ELM itself, combined with a swathe of governance and legal challenges.
The crisis has resulted in ELM Executive Mayor Gift Moerane announcing the formation of a business advisory panel to partner with ELM and other stakeholders on practical projects to turn the situation around sustainably and as soon as possible.
Mayor Moerane has already requested the Golden Triangle Chamber of Commerce (GTCoC) and Large Power Users (LPU’s) to provide proposals on how to manage the present electricity crisis.
Earlier this year the GTCoC and other organisations such as Proudly Three Rivers and Emfuleni Ratepayers Association (ERPA) set up an enabling structure to build business and community capacity to partner with ELM directly.
Called “Emfuleni for Change” (EFC), and headed by GTCoC Vice President Jaco Verwey, the structure will mobilise skills and management capacity in all areas of municipal services, including revenue generation to partner directly with ELM.
Verwey said after the meeting the EFC was still going through an intensive developmental and consultation process with all stakeholders but especially with Mayor Moerane and would integrate with and closely partner with the Mayor’s purpose-fit structure, which is still itself in development.
“At this stage we are aiming for the EFC structure to go operational in April 2020 but we will be involved throughout even now in Mayor Moerane’s initiative to get an over-arching partnership structure in place to ensure the synergies necessary for exponential success,” said Verwey.
It is understood that the combined partnership with Mayor Moerane’s initiative could broadly result in something approximating a Mayoral Advisory Board in which all stakeholders are represented under the leadership of Mayor Moerane.
This partnership would then directly address through various projects the management, service delivery and revenue generation bottlenecks confronting ELM with the EFC as a joint implementation capacity along with ELM and other stakeholders.
However, it is understood that co-operation on operational issues is already taking place between various business roleplayers and Mayor Moerane to enable projects to be implemented even before any formal launch.
These include electricity supply, the Vaal River sewage pollution situation, revenue generation and projects to directly address mistrust in ELM and addressing the pervasive culture of non-payment in Emfuleni.