Municipalities battling to meet service delivery demand

Municipalities continue to leave residents wanting across the country.

Essential service delivery needs like water, electricity, road maintenance, and sanitation remain unfulfilled.

Umngeni Local Municipality Mayor, Christopher Pappas says apart from rampant corruption, the geographical set-up of municipalities also present an uphill battle.

Pappas said, “the way that our municipalities have been drawn up, in other ways the geographic boundaries of municipalities. Some municipalities were never made to succeed, you look at many of the rural municipalities here in KZN, you look at their ability to generate revenue and the limited options that we have as municipalities to generate our own revenue, and then, you know, it’s almost setting people up for failure.”

“When you add corruption on that and inefficiencies, skills deficits, then you just make that problem worse. So on the one case, the structure of local government that we have in South Africa in places like KZN is not helping to succeed, but then all the other endemic problems that we have as a country and as a province just exacerbate that and make it a lot worse.”

Source: eNCA

In other news – Police say drug overdose might have killed Pearl Shongwe

Late radio news reader Pearl Shongwe‘s cause of death has been suspected to be a drug overdose. A local publication reports that police officers found drugs in her bedroom when they did a cleanup at her home.

“We suspect drug overdose because we have found drugs in her bedroom when we were combing the house for possible leads to her death,” the police officer told the publication. They further stated that they are looking into surveillance cameras to determine who might have been the last person to be with Shongwe while she was alive. Learn More