Pretoria - Motorists in Mabopane have accused the City of Tshwane of not taking the battle against potholes seriously.
According to them, municipal workers deployed to sites patch a few potholes and leave others.
Yesterday, David Ledwada and Job Motaung of Lebanon, Mabopane, said what was frustrating motorists was that every day they saw municipal workers being offloaded from trucks on various roads, with their work equipment.
“The workers patch potholes on one portion and leave many others just a walking distance away.
“Because the entire road is littered with potholes, this is not a solution as the road is only smooth on one portion and the rest is hard to drive on,” Motaung said.
He gave as an example of the intersection of Lebanon Road and M44, where potholes were recently patched.
But, he said, many others were left unattended to on either side of the intersection.
“These are really serious potholes that they have left.
“So it leaves us wondering if these people are serious about service delivery or are they just doing it just for the sake of it.
“My challenge to them is that they must come to Mabopane and drive on these roads and then tell us if it makes sense to patch 10 potholes and leave 300 others.
“We are not saying they must rehabilitate the entire road, but show us some respect and do a neat job and patch potholes from point to point.
“Do not just come and patch 10 potholes at intersections and leave 45 others a stone’s throw away,” said Motaung.
Last week, the City of Tshwane launched the Bon Accord quarry crusher plant which was upgraded to assist the municipality to produce and provide material for building and maintenance of roads instead of depending on external suppliers.
Residents complain that the City has neglected disadvantaged areas in favour of affluent ones that have significantly better roads.
Mayor Randall Williams said potholes were a citywide challenge which the metro was addressing, but it was doing so with revenue limitations.
He said the Bon Accord plant would assist in the battle to eradicate potholes without costing the City a lot of money, as it would remove the procurement processes involved when sourcing material.
MMC for Finance , Peter Sutton, speaking to Pretoria News, admitted that the City would need to employ an active approach and drive along the roads to see the extent of the damage and then make repairs, instead of sending out workers to patch certain reported potholes only.
He said the City was continuing with its road maintenance programme, “but as we are aware, people were not seeing or feeling the impact.”
“The (situation) has reached a level where we have to play catch-up for a lot of reasons.
“Some of these reasons stem from our lack of maintenance and others from the rainy season.
“Perhaps poor quality workmanship in the past has led to those potholes reopening.
“We are always looking for innovative ways to catch-up with this backlog.
“In all honesty, we must say that the City of Tshwane, in the future, does not want to be the municipality that is the best at fixing potholes. That should never be the vision and it is not our vision.
“We need to resurface the roads.
“We need to seal them and we need to get back to the proactive maintenance to avoid potholes,” said Sutton.
Sutton said there was a need for an innovative way to solve the problem of potholes because the way things were being done now was not working.
Pretoria News