DURBAN - “LAZY” city workers have been put on notice, with eThekwini mayor Mxolisi Kaunda issuing a stern warning that the city intends to deal decisively with workers who are failing to perform their duties.
Kaunda said that from July, all city workers would be subjected to performance contracts, and not just top management, to ensure that each individual met the conditions of their employment.
He was addressing the media recently on the state of the city and the progress made to deliver services to communities.
His address touched on issues including infrastructure and the performance of city workers.
The Mercury understands that similar concerns were raised by the city’s political leaders in a meeting with ratepayers last week.
Some ratepayer organisations said this conversation over the workers’ performance was long overdue.
Kaunda said consequence management would be applied for those not doing their work.
“The issue is enforcing and instilling the culture of work, to ensure that people come to work on time, people do not leave early, as well as that the absenteeism levels are reduced.
“Those are the systems that the (acting) city manager is going to be putting in place to make certain that productivity levels in the municipality are improving.
“Yes, we have more than 26 000 employees in the city, but productivity does not reflect that all of them are hard at work and working tirelessly to deliver,” said Kaunda.
He said they had conducted a skills audit that also gave them insight into several issues.
For instance, they found that some employees had been misallocated (not placed according to their skills).
Kaunda also touched on service delivery matters, saying a lot had been achieved. He said the city faced many service delivery challenges, some of which had been exacerbated by vandalism.
Among the challenges were water leaks and non-functioning street lights, which Kaunda said were due to criminal elements.
“We have discovered that in areas where there have been challenges of water, we have discovered that people have interfered with our infrastructure and have vandalised it.”
Asad Gaffar, the chairperson of the Westville Ratepayers’ Association, said Kaunda had been honest in his assessment of the problems.
“When he spoke, it felt like he was speaking to the ratepayers, as those are the issues that we have raised in the letter that we wrote to him.
“We raised the issue of service delivery, of workers not doing their jobs,” he said.
“What remains to be seen is whether he can translate the words into action. We cannot have a situation where the mayor wants to change things and the officials are dragging their feet,” he said.
Navin Dookran of the Clare Estate Ratepayers’ Association said the issue of workers’ performance was something that should have been raised years ago.
Giving an example, he said some employees were failing in the simple task of cutting grass.
He said that this weekend, part of Clare Estate had a power outage, and they were recently informed by the municipality’s officials that the electricity unit had a serious problem with the vandalism of its infrastructure.
ALSO READ:
– Concern over eThekwini Municipality’s ‘dysfunctional’ economic committee
– EThekwini Municipality commended on efforts to address water challenges
MOST READ:
– Zandile Gumede elected eThekwini ANC chairperson in spite of corruption charges
– WATCH: Residents cheer as man rescues goose from large hungry snake in Limpopo