VANDERBIJLPARK – Dirty towns, piled up garbage in every corner of the civic centers and growing dumping zones in the town outskirts, these are some of the headaches contributing to the state of collapse in Emfuleni Local Municipality.
Despite millions being used for waste refuse each year, the civic centers and kasis seem to continue getting dirtier.
Yesterday, Sedibeng Ster took a tour in and around the Vanderbijlpark precinct where the headquarters of the embattled municipality lies.
Piled up waste was order of the day as dustbins in the civic centre were filled up.
As if this was not enough, a huge pile of refuse, lied on the main entrance of the haunted municipality offices.
Despite one garbage truck roaming the city center and having two employees picking up waste, most street bins were left unpicked.
Speaking on waste headaches in the Vaal in general, Democratic Alliance’s MPL Kingsol Chabalala said the state the municipality is in, is deeply concerning.
“It is regrettable and deeply concerning that services in Emfuleni have collapsed. Things are moving from bad to worse. This municipality is limping from one disaster to another. Taking to consideration the provincial government had deployed administrators and yet things are not improving. We learnt from the MEC that this municipality is spending R2,3 million on refuse collection a month on contractors appoint to collect waste,” he said.
Chabalala said employees are paid over R1,4 million on salaries and yet Emfuleni is still dirty.
“On over time alone, employees are paid over R800 000 and then you begin to ask yourself what are they paying for. The municipality also cough about R900 000 on clearing of dump sites a month, which has ballooned to almost R40 million in five years yet we still have piles of rubbish,” he added.
Ward 10 committee member Gert Cronje said “service delivery doesn’t exist in our area. We don’t expect anything from the municipality anymore, except excuses and blame games. How do they expect us to pay for services we don’t get?”.
Defending the municipality, Executive Mayor Sipho Radebe blamed recent attachments of accounts by Eskom.
“Waste is a serious concern in our municipality, however as the municipality we lost seven weeks of service delivery due to the attachments by Eskom. That on its own, gave us a negative impact towards refuse collection. It is also a serious concern that last year we started improving our capacity to collect, but when Eskom attached our movable asserts, we went back to square one,” he said.
