Ekurhuleni mayor calls for integrity, accountability

478 25.03.2015 The Executive mayor of Ekurhuleni Mondli Gungubele, wipes his face before he makes the key note address, at the state of the city addresses, Germiston. Picture: Itumeleng English

478 25.03.2015 The Executive mayor of Ekurhuleni Mondli Gungubele, wipes his face before he makes the key note address, at the state of the city addresses, Germiston. Picture: Itumeleng English

Published Mar 26, 2015

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Johannesburg - Ekurhuleni tender adjudication committee meetings will be open to public scrutiny from July to increase transparency and fight corruption in the procurement system.

Ekurhuleni mayor Mondli Gungubele made this declaration on Wednesday when he delivered his State of the City Address.

Buoyed by a clean audit that the metropolitan municipality received last year, Gungubele urged council officials to show greater accountability and integrity in their work.

“We need to adopt a high level enforcement of an anti-fraud and anti-corruption strategy which will seek to reinforce our objective of ensuring good and clean governance, and accountability,” the mayor said in his three-hour-long speech.

He said the council had already taken drastic steps to fight corruption. He sounded a warning to politicians in the municipality.

“Corruption is a cancer that is ravaging our institutions and communities. Most of our senior managers have undergone vetting by the State Security Agency and the next level of management, and officials holding critical roles will soon follow.

“We also intend to extend the programme to politicians.

“Furthermore, bid adjudication committee meetings will from July this year be open to the public to enhance transparency of the process.”

Gungubele urged the public to assist the municipality in its strategy to fight corruption by reporting illicit practices to the internal audit team.

The mayor devoted much of his speech to bragging about his municipality’s achievements, notably “the decrease” in informal settlements, better rates collection, and improvements in response times by emergency and disaster management services.

He also highlighted some of the problems facing the council, including water wastage and the fixing of dysfunctional traffic lights.

“We have heard the cries of our communities that the Ekurhuleni metropolitan police department is not doing enough to deal with traffic when the traffic lights are off. Indeed this is not acceptable. Our police must do traffic control every time the need arises,” he said.

Gungubele was particularly concerned about the wastage of water in the municipality.

“In the area of water, allow me to raise the alarm that we are still among the main contributors to the country’s water-loss woes,” he said, adding that the municipality continued to replace faulty and leaking water meters.

Another area of concern, he added, was the “skyrocketing” scourge of drugs.

“I am happy to announce that we will soon be establishing a more specialised drugs task team.

“With the scourge of nyaope (a concoction of rat poison and crushed antiretroviral drug into a street drug) destroying our society, in the next year we will be establishing a substance-abuse rehabilitation centre for the region,” Gungubele said.

The mayor’s address was not without the drama recently seen in Parliament and some of the provincial legislatures.

Opposition councillors from the DA benches occasionally interrupted his speech by raising placards depicting sewage and garbage overflowing in the streets and near residential properties.

Points of orders were occasionally raised from the DA and PAC benches, prompting Speaker Patricia Kumalo to plead for order.

“Let’s focus on what we have to do and forget the sideshows,” she said.

At one stage, Gungubele appeared to lose his calm.

“That (disruption) gives me more stamina. What we are saying is that we (ANC-led council) will be attested to (affirmed) by our people in 2016,” he said, referring to next year’s local government elections.

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