service delivery

The level of crime in South Africa has evidently sent government into emotional bewilderment. This is more so as a result of the violent crimes whose perpetrators are apparently merciless and recognise no boundary. Everyone, excluding the perpetrators and those with whom they act in cahoots, is under siege. Obviously any responsible government would want to do something to curb or rid its population of such a scourge. Taking the fight to the criminals! The question is how?

The national debate is so taken with invented ‘policy shifts’ that it ignores those that are real. This is according to Steven Friedman, director for the Centre for the Study of Democracy, an initiative of Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg.

Friedman says that in a recent television interview, Cooperative Governance Minister, Sicelo Shiceka, endorsed two policy changes that could make local government more democratic and might give citizens less reason to engage in the protests that have dogged municipalities for four years.

Residents of Malamulele, near Thohoyandou, have marched to the offices of the Thulamela local municipality to demand that the town gets its own local municipality.

Malamulele South African Civic Organisation (SANCO) chairperson, Foster Mtshabi, has been quoted as saying "We want to break away from Thulamela and have our own municipality. We have the support of the Malamulele Sunrise Committee, which was formed to ensure better service delivery in the area."

Every year, GreaterGood South Africa organises and hosts Do It Day, a call-to-action event that connects people with good causes around the country. Do It Day is all about building a culture of volunteering in South Africa and exemplifies the unifying power volunteering has to change lives.

The National Executive Committee of the ANC will start a three-day meeting on Friday to discuss, among other things, recent service delivery protests, a spokesperson said.

"This meeting takes place in the background of some sporadic service delivery protests that have taken place in some parts of the country," said ANC spokesperson Brian Sokutu.

Disgruntled members of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) marched to the Ekurhuleni mayoral offices to hand over a memorandum demanding better health services yesterday.

TAC spokesman, Nokwezi Hoboyi said there were various clinics within Ekurhuleni struggling with shortages of the anti-retrovirals.

“In the past few months, the ARV roll-out has lost momentum, many thousands of people remain on waiting lists and most patients have CD4 counts in the region of 100 by the time they are finally initiated onto ARVs.”

High staff turnover due to a lack of adequate subsidisation by Government, plagues many South African NGOs, that struggle to provide the necessary services to communities in need.

In the Eastern Cape subsidies used to pay social workers have not been increased in two years, while social auxiliary workers are subsidised on the Department of Social Development’s 2002 scales.

KwaZulu-Natal Finance MEC, Ina Cronje, says mobile technology and broadband need to be considered to latch onto “first class, real time” service delivery.

Speaking at a breakfast meeting in Durban, Cronje stressed that the utilisation of technologies is paramount to maximise benefits from services for government planning.

“In order to utilise the mobile platform, we as KwaZulu-Natal need to ensure that there is a pipeline of appropriate skills to develop the required mobile applications,” explained Cronje.

The South African government has set itself the target of redistributing 30% of South Africa’s commercial farming land to black farmers by 2014. So far it has only achieved just over 4%.

The easiest way to quickly reach the 30% target would be for government to find large amounts of cheap, unproductive peripheral land and allocate this to a few people. This land could be in the middle of the arid Karoo or the Northern Cape.

President Jacob Zuma has dismissed suggestions his new executive is too big.

Replying in the National Assembly to points raised during debate on his budget vote, Zuma pointed out that, “Let me assure the House once again that the changes we have made to the configuration of departments are guided by the need to improve service delivery, and to correct the weaknesses that the people had identified.”