Citizens of Joburg would be justified in feeling aggrieved at the levels of remuneration city mandarins have been awarded, as we reported last week. Our report showed that the heads of the city’s 13 service entities, such as City Power, Pikitup, the Johannesburg Roads Agency and the Tourism Company, each earned between R1m and R4.98m a year.
If residents contrast this with the sorry state of the city, they could legitimately ask if they are getting value for the money they pay top officials.
The city’s service delivery failures are now legendary. Anyone using Joburg’s roads will be familiar with their notorious potholes, along with perennially malfunctioning traffic lights. Joburg is also where householders and businesses often bear the brunt of water and power outages.
It seems that, as they cream it, officials fall far short of delivering on Joburg’s mantra of being a world-class African city, so-called. But, as the auditor-general has observed, the blame should be shared with the city’s political leadership for failing to insist on appointing people with the right skills to key positions or demanding financial rectitude in how the city is run.
The related question is whether Joburg’s freestanding entities help to make it more efficient in serving citizens or whether they serve simply to drain resources while serving as sites for dispensing patronage. Given Joburg’s many, and worsening, service delivery problems, the patronage issue becomes a more plausible proposition.
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