Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille has appealed to residents for help in monitoring companies who clean and provide sanitation.
|||Cape Town - Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille has appealed to residents for help in monitoring companies who clean and provide sanitation services in a bid to improve service delivery in informal settlements.
On Tuesday, De Lille launched the “Know your Community, Know your Contractor” campaign saying the city has realised that it has to communicate with residents to know whether they are getting proper services and if contractors are providing the service the city pays them for.
This comes a month after Khayelitsha residents highlighted the dismal state of chemical toilets and the failure of Mshengu Services to maintain the toilets according to its R140 million contract with the city.
De Lille said the city, as part of its efforts to be a caring city, had to be responsive to the needs of people and would open all channels of communication so that residents could lodge complaints when services were not being delivered.
She said the city had installed 70 FreeCall Lines which residents could use to lodge complaints in disadvantaged areas and would install 20 more FreeCall lines by July.
De Lille said she would embark on a series of public meetings to inform residents who the service providers were, what level of cleanliness the city expected and what channels residents could follow to lodge claims.
“The campaign is aimed at informing residents living in informal settlements about their rights and obligations related to city services they receive,” De Lille said.
She said the city had systems in place to monitor its contractors such as spot checks, inspections between the city and the contractor, community workers to assist with monitoring service provision, janitors, crosschecking invoices and monitoring and measuring waste drop-offs at the designated points.
“However we cannot be in all places at all times. We rely on communities being the eyes and ears of the city, helping us to identify any shortcomings on behalf of the community,” she said.
While it is the city’s duty to provide services and to monitor the contractors, De Lille said residents also had to keep their neighbourhoods clean and in a healthy state. For this financial year alone, she said the city spent R13.9m on repairing water and sanitation infrastructure damaged by vandals.
De Lille will hold eight public meetings which started last night in Block 6, Philippi.
Next week, she will hold meetings with residents in Gugulethu, Khayelitsha, Dunoon, Imizamo Yethu, The Heights, Freedom Farm and Malawi Camp.
“A critical aspect to this campaign is to remind communities that if they have exhausted all communication channels to the city, they must make use of their councillor about aspects of delivery that require attention,” De Lille said.
zara.nicholson@inl.co.za
Cape Times