City stalls on money for homes, aged

THE non-approval of an additional R580 million towards Joburg’s capital expenditure (capex) will have dire consequences for service delivery as accusations of political ploys in the city continue to rage.

Jolidee Matongo, a member of the mayoral committee for finance, reacting to Friday’s council sitting that rejected the proposed R580.3m capex budget adjustment, said increasing the capex from the approved R7.8 billion in May last year to the proposed R8.3bn would have gone towards the refurbishment of old-age homes and social housing.

According to council documents, R140m was to be allocated to social housing and related bulk infrastructure projects, such as a R40.2m development in Cosmo City and R36m in Diepsloot, as well as upgrading six old-age homes and eight hostels and flats.

Matongo stressed, however, that the city still had a budget regardless of the adjustments not passing in council. “But now that the adjustment budget did not pass, this means that the people who are staying in flats, old-age homes and hostels are going to suffer because the budget was meant to attend to issues such as repairs and maintenance.”

Although the ANC leads in the 270-seat council with 121 seats, no party has an outright majority, with the ANC governing in a coalition from December.

The capex council presentation had also proposed R25m towards procuring cleaning equipment for insourced city workers.

Matongo took a swipe at the EFF in Joburg for not voting for the adjustment, saying the party had strongly advocated for workers to be insourced, but refused to back a budget to fund the employees.

“In the capex budget, we would have allocated money for the tools of the workers’ trade, the cleaning material and associated stuff, but the EFF didn’t approve of that.

“We’re simply saying that these people must work for eight hours a day but they must not have the tools of the trade; it doesn’t make sense,” Matongo asserted.

EFF leader in Joburg Musa Novela did not respond to repeated calls and text messages yesterday asking for a response to Matongo’s assertions.

Dalu Cele, who spoke on behalf of the DA caucus, emphasised yesterday that his party was not derailing service delivery but worried that the ANC was using the adjustment as a political ploy.

“What the ANC did was that they took money from the existing budget and moved it to the ANC-aligned wards. That was our bottom line for not supporting the capex adjustment budget.

“We did not want existing projects to suffer by moving existing projects to ANC-aligned wards. Because we are moving into an election year, you would find that that money would not have been used for its intended purpose,” Cele said.