Pretoria - ActionSA president Herman Mashaba has made his party’s intentions clear to bag the Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and Joburg municipalities in the November 1 election.
Addressing about 200 people at a picket outside Tshwane House yesterday, flanked by mayoral candidate Abel Tau and Ekurhuleni’s mayoral Tlhogi Moseki, the party’s candidate for Joburg said the three mayoral candidates had not entered into politics to be on opposition benches, but to govern.
The former Joburg mayor, while taking a swipe at the ruling ANC in that metro, vowed that his party would seize the three municipalities in the coming polls.
“Come November 1, you are going to give us a mandate to own the city. Days of cadres is over. It’s you who are the bosses and not these politicians. We are giving you the power back.
“If these thieves come to campaign at your house just tell them you are hungry and want food parcels. As soon as they give you the food parcels chase them out of your house because they think this government is an extension of Luthuli House. So under ActionSA that nonsense needs to stop,” he said.
Mashaba added that the main reason for the picket was to fight for residents’ rights to have access to an effective, reliable and fit-for-purpose public service that insources front line staff where they are needed most.
“Serving in the public service should be one of the most cherished and rewarding career paths in South Africa.
“However, years of cadre deployment, corruption, the manipulation of self-serving hiring practices have crippled the public service – residents have lost faith in the government’s ability to serve them. No place has this been more evident than in the DA-led City of Tshwane.
“To this day, the DA is yet to take residents into their confidence and explain their R80 million salaries bungle. For a full year, over 600 general workers reported to the City for work but were forced to stand idle as there was no work for them – despite the desperate need for competent workers who attend to resident complaints across the City.
“In all of this, not a single DA-politician has been held to account. Even more concerning, the DA has kept mum on allegations of fraud and corruption in the matter, with allegations of contract payments having been made to ghost employees.
“In Johannesburg, eThekwini and Ekurhuleni, matters are no better. Cadre deployment and poor management of workers have destroyed service delivery.
“We will no longer tolerate mediocre performance or failing service delivery. We will create a performance-driven, competitive, yet caring, workplace for municipal officials, but we will also expect our officials to work hard and get the job done. We will transform our municipal organisations to ensure that rate and taxpayers’ money is spent on service delivery, not on ‘Millionaire Managers’.
“We will overhaul the top-heavy structures of our municipalities and replace them with organisations that are ready to serve the residents of our municipalities.”
Mashaba promised that ActionSA would end the “exploitation” of front line service workers by instituting a plan of insourcing which would not only create dignified jobs but deliver quality services to residents.
“Our security staff and cleaners will have permanent contracts that provide dignity and favourable employment conditions, rather than being left to the whims of tenderpreneurs.
“Today (yesterday), we delivered our plan for professionalising the public service to the City of Tshwane’s administration, providing them with a blueprint for fixing service delivery in Tshwane. We will be sharing our plan with the cities of Johannesburg, eThekwini, and Ekurhuleni."
Some of the promises Mashaba made included adopting merit-based recruitment practices, implementing recruitment policies that place merit, competency and experience at the centre of all appointments, especially in management positions and that political patronage and cadre deployment would have to be abolished.
Pretoria News