The Gauteng Provincial Legislature’s Standing Committee on Petitions has raised serious concerns about the unresolved petitions that are currently clogging the system and obscuring the Committee from tackling other substantive issues.
The committee’s chairperson, advocate Ezra Letsoalo, had a meeting with the Gauteng Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) and the Department of Human Settlements recently.
According to Letsoalo, there were 142 petitions on Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) housing allocations ranging from applications made between 1996 to 2022, including old C-form applications (1996–1999), and the elderly and persons living with disabilities, which were handed over to the Department of Human Settlements.
The RDP allocations were the largest chunk of petitions that the committee was inundated with. During the current 6th Legislative term, 51% of all adopted petitions were RDP-related. The handover was to encourage the fast-tracking of the resolution of residents’ petitions, Letsoalo said.
“The committee no longer wants to deal with the same complaint on service delivery issues individually. These tend to obscure our focus on more substantive issues that relate to other service delivery issues from different service departments.
“The petitions system is well utilised by ordinary citizens who have no other redress mechanisms for their issues. We therefore want to give all petitions our attention and speedily resolve them, especially where there are no inter-reliant limitations, and bring our petitions register updated with the current roll of petitions,” he said.
His meeting with the Cogta and Human Settlements Department was largely for the two departments to provide progress reports on historical batches of petitions related to their areas of responsibility since they were handed over in July 2023.
Cogta has been tasked by the committee to effectively facilitate, coordinate, and speedily report on all outstanding municipal service delivery petitions for the effective closure of the petitions, thus addressing the committee’s backlog.
Letsoalo said the committee expected a comprehensive report from the Department of Human Settlements.
“This report is expected to illustrate the extent to which the department would have gone to individually notify and update all 142 petitioners on their application status. Furthermore, update the committee on the creation of channels where petitioners can frequently enquire for the latest update on their application status,” he said.
The petitions would remain open until the committee believes there have been “satisfactory levels of interventions” implemented to warrant the closure of the petitions.