Utter chaos seems to be the brand of the City of Joburg these days. If it is not water supply problems, it’s something else. The city is fielding yet another concerning scandal related to complaints brought by residents, who are accusing the city’s officials of corruption and extortion.
Residents of Johannesburg who have been trying to access their house plans allege a number of very serious things.
The first allegation is that the city has neglected its responsibility to preserve and maintain property records and make them available to the public. This is most concerning because if the city cannot keep accurate records of property plans, how does it intend to embark on redevelopment, revitalisation, rezoning or anything relevant to property management if they don’t have well maintained records?
If that is the case we should challenge the so-called plans that the city has been selling us because either they were lying, or they were telling the truth and will go ahead with developments without plans, which is scary considering they only just recently fixed the Bree street gas explosion mess.
A second and equally concerning allegation made by the people of Jozi is that the officials who work for the city that should be assisting the public gain access to their housing records, have instead turned predatory. They are targeting residents who want to obtain their plans by deliberately overcharging them to the tune of R2,000 instead of the stipulated R40 printing fee.
Reports say that this syndicate preys on desperate citizens by first dashing their hopes and informing them that their plans are stuck somewhere in the basement of the previous building that they occupied and they have no access to those records. Then they take your cellphone number to contact you later, telling you there is a way for you to get the plans you so desperately need, but there is a catch, you will have to break the law by bribing a government official and enabling government extortion of citizens. Oh, and it will also cost you significantly more than you had anticipated and also due to the nature of this “deal”, you may or may not receive what you paid for, and you must understand, that’s just the nature of criminality.
The brazen nature of these allegations just goes to show how rampant and in the open corruption is in the City of Johannesburg. The decay is not only relegated to the streets and mouldy, flaky walls of hijacked hazardous city ruins, because we should not refer to them as buildings, the decay is malignant and toxic and certainly portrays a city out of control with criminality as part of its DNA.
They say character reflects leadership and if what we’ve seen from Dada Morero’s leadership in addressing the water crisis in the west of Johannesburg is anything to go by, we really should not be surprised at the arrogant, disconnected, disenfranchised, totally inept nature of the city and its officials because it reflects the nature of the city’s leadership or lack thereof.
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