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E Cape residents urge govt to reverse municipality merger

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Residents of the newly-established municipalities in the Eastern Cape want the provincial government to reverse the merger of certain municipalities.

They say this is because some of the municipalities are on the verge of collapse.

Some municipalities were merged after the 2016 municipal elections to fast-track service delivery and to generate more revenue.

Some frustrated residents of the Raymond Mhlaba, Enoch Mgijima and Walter Sisulu municipalities say the establishment of these municipalities is instead hampering service delivery.

A resident says, “This Raymond Mhlaba Municipality has frustrated the community of Bedford, we have not benefited anything we were better of as former Nxuba there is no accountability we want to go back to Nxuba  and there is no service delivery.”

“The situation in Enoch Mgijima is very dire and serious we are a municipality in crisis , we are a municipality that cannot sustain itself  we are municipality that is not even not assisted by COGTA although COGTA was the one facilitated the merger,” says another resident.

African National Congress (ANC) provincial secretary Lulama Ngcukayitobi has attributed the crisis in the new municipalities to a lack of leadership, poor planning and inadequate budget.

“Critical problems at the centre are the issue of leadership that is not able to carry full integration of services to the people and secondly to ensure harmonisations of workers equal pay, equal work so immediately they are unable to do that is to create problems. We have invited Cogta MEC and Finance MEC such that they are able to deal with those problems and such that those municipalities are able to run their own course without any assistance from any one.”

Cogta MEC Fikile Xasa says he has established a team of experts to assist these municipalities.

“We are establishing a team of specialists in the field of engineering, finance as well as legal services this team will be deployed in all the four new municipalities to assist them so that they can recover financially so that they can be able to deliver basic services to communities.”

 

 

 

 

 

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