Joburg shops for new city boss

The City of Johannesburg has approved a report to recruit its next manager.

Tabled by group corporate and shared services MMC Loyiso Masuku and agreed to by council, the report outlines the guidelines to be followed by the city when it searches for its new city manager.

This comes after the ousting of former city manager Floyd Brink following a DA-led court bid which challenged his appointment and found it to be irregular.

The government of local unity coalition took a decision not to appeal the outcome but instead appoint city operations officer Tshepo Makola to act in the position while they searched for a replacement.

Councillors urged the executive to speed up the process and ensure a city manager was appointed to stabilise governance.

Masuku told councillors it was in the executive’s interest the vacancy was filled, but they could not commit to a timeline.

“It is not entirely up to us to ensure it is wrapped up in two months. There are processes to be undertaken,” she said, adding the process of recruitment would be external.

“There is also the vetting process where we use state institutions once a shortlisting has been conducted.

“Our intention is not to deliberately drag [out] the recruitment process. Our commitment has been clear from the start when we came in as the government of local unity that we intend to stabilise senior management, and we have proven our commitment in that regard.”

The council meeting tabled a performance report of the department and city entities.

In his statement, mayor Dada Morero said: “Today, as we make critical decisions, we must ensure we improve our relationship with 5.8-million residents. All of us have experienced water, electricity, roads and waste management challenges. The challenges are hampering our relationship with our communities.

“Every day is a service delivery battlefield, but this battle we are going to win. It is us who declared this city a world-class African city and it is us who can make it a world-class African city of the future.”

Morero affirmed his executive’s strategic priorities as set out in their integrated development plan remain, and said they will channel their energies towards ensuring a financial sustainability pathway remains the cornerstone for operational success.

“Accelerate service delivery reforms to improve citizen satisfaction and to enhance our safety measures through data-driven and resource-optimised strategies,” he said.

The mayor revealed his executive has set up an integrated service delivery war room whose primary objective is to improve the co-ordination and effectiveness of service delivery across Johannesburg’s regions through an integrated operational approach.

“We are starting to see real-time monitoring. We can track service delivery activities and incidents across all departments and entities, and rapid response activation enables swift mobilisation of relevant teams for immediate issue resolution.

“Cross entity co-ordination is a cornerstone fostering interdepartmental co-operation to ensure alignment of service delivery objectives with the city’s strategic development goals.”

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