The evening of Tuesday 8 May, may have been bitterly cold across Johannesburg, but inside the Roodepoort City Hall passions flared as the poorest residents of the City used the Integrated Development Plan (IDP) consultation meeting to put their living conditions on the agenda.
They came mainly from informal settlements across Roodepoort and surrounding areas, including Matholeville, Snake Park, Zandspruit, Braamfischerville, Tshepisong, Doornkop, Durban Deep and Princess to tell City of their hardships.
Executive Mayor Herman Mashaba was accompanied by senior city managers, depot managers of various city entities, Members of the Mayoral Committee and the Regional Director.
When proceedings started after some disruptions, Mayor Mashaba painted a picture of a City bursting at the seams with inherited infrastructure backlog of R170 billion and a limited budget to attend to residents’ needs. He said his administration had a “mammoth task” to tackle challenges of youth unemployment, safety, huge income disparities, but insisted that his administration was up to the task.
“I’m committed to ensure that over time we improve your conditions. We can’t resolve all the issues overnight. There are no short cuts.”
Mayor Mashaba said the City was creating an enabling environment for business to invest so that it could increase its economic growth rate from the 2.6% recorded last year. “Judge us on the investment we manage to attract to the city. Judge us on public safety. Judge us on the professionalism of our service and on the delivery of houses.”
Regional Director Mlamleli Belot provided feedback on issues that residents had raised in the last IDP session and the status of various projects currently underway across the region.
He said the City had installed street lights in Braamfischerville and Zandspruit will get its own street lights in the next financial year. The electrification of informal settlements was continuing apace. The Kloofendaal substation was being upgraded and a new substation was going up in Wilro Park to reduce outages. The sewer system is being upgraded in Doornkop.
Many roads in places such as Braamfischerville and Doornkop were under construction, “but we are going in phases because Braamfischerville for instance has many extensions”, he warned. When Belot reported that work was underway to register people who had applied for RDP housing back in 1996/7 on C Forms, the hall burst into song and there were interjections from many aspirant homeowners.
He got the attention of the audience when he said the City had started to register people who qualify for unoccupied houses in Fleurhof. Belot also reported that money had been secured for bulk infrastructure at the Malibongwe Ridge Housing Project. Many hands were raised during question time as many people wanted to raise their issues with the City’s leaders.
Thandi Keke from Ward 127 told a harrowing story of how she was driven to prostitution because she had nothing to eat. She also decried the high rate of rape in the area.
Lebohang Selepe of Ward 127 Thamsanqa Gwaju told the mayor that after 20 years, people in Ward 128 in Tshepisong still had to use the bucket system.
Aubrey Mathangatha from Ward 128 in Tshepisong called for the area to be proclaimed as a township so that it could get services from the City.
Lebohang Selepe from Braamfischerville called for the local mobile clinic in to supply chronic medication. There were also calls for mobile clinics to be provided in other wards as well.
When the time came for the second round of questions to be taken, there was pushing and shoving as more people demanded to be heard. The meeting slowly degenerated and as it became clear that proceedings would not continue, Mayor Mashaba invited the audience to submit written comments and questions on the forms that had been provided.
With the session ending unceremoniously, the City’s poor hopped into the buses to transport them back to their squatter camps where they would continue to eke out a living without visible means of subsistence.
