“There should never again in the local government be a place for political or ideological sloganeering, but more of the desire to work hard to serve the needs of communities,” Themba Kalipa, a member of the mayoral committee: infrastructure service, told Sunday World on Thursday.
Kalipa, formerly an ANC and SACP member, and now representing COPE in the Ekurhuleni municipality, said despite the liquidity crisis facing the municipality, “all political hands should be on deck” and seek to find a solution to the municipality’s poor service delivery challenges.
“We are all in it for one reason, and one reason only, which is to serve our community diligently. We are a coalition local government, and we should respect that reality and seek to work hard to carry out the mandate given to us by our constituencies,” said Kalipa.
“No member of any political party should see themselves as more privileged than the other. We serve in the mayoral committee as a coalition, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise.
“There is no majority, and so we need to all put a shoulder to the wheel to produce a responsive local government whose mission is to serve the people of this metro.”
Kalipa blamed the liquidity crisis now facing the municipality on a lack of professionalism, when public servants mistakenly believed they owed their allegiance to political principalities.
He said: “Going forward, public servants should stay away from the hurly-burly of political ructions, and simply bring to bear their professional training and expertise.”
Kalipa lambasted the cadre deployment philosophy, suggesting “it is an animal that should be starved off oxygen until it dies a natural death”, adding that bidding committees as a supply management value chain pipeline should be well-managed “because often that is where the rot occurs, and wheels tend to go off”.
As head of the infrastructure portfolio, Kalipa said his main focus was to work collaboratively “so that we do our best to get the city’s infrastructure in great shape”.
“The communities need that we build roads, bridges, and to fix broken roads, and ensure that as far as possible, potholes in their streets become a thing of the past.
“We need to sort out the crumbling rail infrastructure, and help to alleviate unemployment crisis in our city, and ultimately in the country, particularly among the youth,” he said.
To this end, his department is engaging with the private sector, and committed “to sourcing their invaluable expertise”.
“Public-private partnership is the way to go. If we do it with a purpose and diligence, the outcomes will be great, and we will begin, bit by bit, to reduce our skyrocketing unemployment rates.
“Public-private collaboration is the way to go. Even as a communist, I know this must be the way to go.
“We should not allow our political ‘isms’ to stand in the way of progress. We need huge injection of investments of all kind in our municipality, and we are already talking to big business to assist us in the infrastructural development programmes because we know investments are a lifeblood of any economy,” he said.
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