Msunduzi mayor grilled over lack of service delivery
Msunduzi's mayor insists they are cleaning up the city after it was labelled filthy by residents.
Mzimkhulu Thebolla and five other mayors in KwaZulu-Natal were in the hot seat at the Coastlands Hotel in Musgrave, Durban on Monday.
They were being grilled about service delivery in their municipalities.
Msunduzi has been under administration for two-and-a-half years.
Residents have, among other things, complained of poor service delivery and the decay in the city.
Thebolla says they now have a programme in place to deal with all service delivery issues.
"We have put in systems now. We have been able to turn around that. We now do collect waste from the households on an admitted and permissible time because we had breakages, we didn't have enough yellow plants.
"But the last financial year, we increased our capacity - equally at the landfill site. Today you get to the landfill site; it meets the regulations."
In nearby uMgeni, a resident and other members of his community have taken matters into their own hands and have been filling up potholes on their main road.
"We have been asking the municipality for many years to try to do something about the road. To be completely fair, they tried patching the potholes once or twice, but they seem to like to give the tenders to do these jobs to people who don't have the idea of what they are doing. More often, they make the problem worse than better. So instead of waiting for the municipality to do it, we did it ourselves."
Jonty Myhill from Curry's Post says over the past three years they have spent close to R30 000 patching up Curry's Post Road.
He says it's become unsafe for motorists.
"I don't necessarily want to fight with the municipality or with anybody else. I know the municipality aren't overly interested in helping and it's a pointless, futile exercise trying to talk to them. The road needs to be repaired and somebody needs to do it so we do it."
In June, Umngeni Municipality said it had set aside R14 million to address the longstanding issue of potholes.
Mayor Sizwe Sokhela said they were aware of the inconvenience caused by the state of their roads.
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