JOHANNESBURG SOUTH – Mr Executive Mayor, to respond to your speech, themed “Turning Challenges into Opportunities”.
It is a wonderful dream with many great potential ideas for a World Class City to strive towards in the future.
I particularly want to start by re-quoting former President Thabo Mbeki when he said: “We must ensure that today is better than yesterday and that tomorrow will be better than today”.
With such a strong starting point I was optimistic about your speech and hoped that you would focus on the idea encapsulated in ex-President Mbeki’s words.
Sadly, this was not to be. You see Mr Mayor, it is all good to have dreams, looking at tomorrow, and great future visions of our city. We admire them. But, as the municipal government of Johannesburg, our main job is to focus on the practical aspect of making the lives of our residents better today and tomorrow. Not just always looking to that future tomorrow.
We need to ask ourselves, when our residents look at our city, do they see a world class African city, or do they see a city with real problems?
When I look at a city where traffic lights are constantly broken, buildings are illegally occupied, cable theft seems unstoppable, potholes are getting larger, yet tariffs are increasing at a rate similar to Eskom blackouts, I do not see a world class city. I see real problems affecting our residents every day. I see a reality that does not match your vision Mr Mayor.
The problem with this State of the City address is that if you are always making promises about tomorrow, you fail to implement solutions to make things better today.
1. You promised that there would be free access to the internet in all 85 city libraries by the end of 2014. However, we are well into 2015 and we have not met this goal.
2. You promised that we would soon have an Office of the Ombudsman able to assist the residents of Johannesburg. A year later and, while we have appointed an Ombudsman, the office is not yet near being operational.
3. You committed to the purchasing of 150 new buses for Metrobus this financial year. With less than two months left, not a single new bus has yet been purchased to replace Metrobus’s old and discontinued buses. This has not materialised and, in the meantime, more bus accidents occur.
4. You committed to only one housing project, that of refurbishing the Helen Joseph Women’s Hostel. Despite housing being a desperate need, even this one project has not started.
5. JMPD 10+, despite promises back from 2012, is still only properly operational in one region in the entire city. Rather than going on, let me say that you, Mr Mayor, appear to be big on promises, but weak on delivery.
Vasco da Gama, DA Johannesburg caucus leader.
