City of Johannesburg (CoJ) Mayor Mpho Phalatse has outlined what the multiparty government in Johannesburg has achieved in the last eight months, and what lies ahead until 2026.

At the start of her term on January 12, she announced her “Golden Start for Service Delivery” commitments for the city, which entail seven mayoral priorities.

The priorities have been embedded in the city’s Integrated Development Plan, the service delivery budget and business plans of departments and 13 municipal entities.

The priorities are aimed at creating a safe and secure, caring, business-friendly, inclusive, well-run and smart city, that gets the basics right.

Phalatse says her team has had to work smart to meet its budgets accordingly, including preparing for an incoming adjustment budget in February next year, which allows for “little wiggle room”.

Of the 38 interventions the mayor set out to achieve by the end of the financial year in June 30, about 66%, or 25 of them, have been achieved, while nine have been partially achieved and four were implemented but not quite in time.

Phalatse says the CoJ has managed to achieve more projects along the way that were not initially part of the plan.

Among the completed achievements of the city are its having set in motion a process of procuring an additional 500 MW of energy, to avert rolling blackouts up to Stage 5. Various requests for proposals are with the National Treasury for approval in this regard.

The city has allocated a large portion – R1.2-billion – of the R7.7-billion capital budget to City Power, to refurbish, upgrade and secure the city’s distribution network to reduce power outages and strengthen it for the onboarding of independent power producers.

Another achievement, Phalatse says, has been Metrobus refurbishing 105 buses, above its targeted 100 buses, within a R50-million budget.

She also considers it an achievement that MMC David Tembe has been working with the South African Police Service, Group Forensic and Investigation Services and the mayor to move forward with a “Joburg City Safety Strategy”, which involves the city partnering with authorities and leveraging relationships with other law enforcement agencies to make the city safer.

For example, the CoJ is working closely with the police to reduce cable theft, with 193 suspects arrested in the 2021/22 financial year, compared with 75 arrested in the 2020/21 financial year.

In July alone, 41 suspects were arrested for cable theft.

Meanwhile, the city has also been hard at work to reduce the city’s 500 000 housing demand backlog, including through designated ten informal settlements for upgrading. Work on the upgrading has begun in Zandspruit, with 700 sites designated for construction and infrastructure establishment.

More achievements by the CoJ in the last eight months include achieving its revenue collection targets in most months, effecting an informal trading policy that recognises informal traders as critical role-players in the city’s economy, and launching an online Construction Permit Management System to allow building applications and plans to be submitted online.

The city is further working to fill vacancies of senior managers and fill the boards of all entities in good time, particularly a City Manager by the end of September.

The full “Golden Report” of the city’s achievements this year will be published on the city’s website soon.