By David Masango

THE overall feeling of Gauteng residents is that the provincial government has improved over the last decade, a report on a recent survey indicates.

According to the results of a survey commissioned by the Provincial Department of Local Government earlier this year, residents gave municipalities an average rating of 5.1 out of 10 for service delivery and governance.

Covering 5008 households across the province, the survey was conducted as a means for the department to understand and measure the citizens' issues and concerns around local government service delivery and governance.

Its key objectives were to assess the citizens' concerns; to assess municipalities' performance; to identify which services citizens were satisfied with and those they were not satisfied with, as well as to rank services according to their importance to citizens.

The survey found that one in three people felt that municipalities were in touch with their needs, while one in five felt the same about councillors.

The top five priorities of citizens were job creation, provision of housing, health services, poverty reduction as well as road maintenance.

Although 50 percent of people were found to have positive perceptions about local government officials, six out of ten felt that corruption existed in local government.

Addressing reporters in Johannesburg during the release of the survey results yesterday, local government MEC Qedani Mahlangu said although municipalities were working hard to provide services, the situation "called for improvement in delivery and perception".

She said the department was intervening through projects like Project Consolidate to support and assist municipalities that performed badly due to various reasons such as lack of capacity.

MEC Mahlangu also said communication between government and communities needed to be enhanced to improve the delivery of services.

"There is a need for coherence and consistency government communicates to communities - there should be closer communication between councillors and communities," she said.

Mahlangu said the deployment of Community Development Workers (CDWs) in communities was important to help unblock service delivery backlogs.

"We need to complete the recruitment of (CDWs) by the end of this year so that they commence with their learnerships next year," she said.

On corruption, Ms Mahlangu said "we need to decisively deal with corruption as and when it occurs to improve the public's confidence in local government officials".
Source: BuaNews