The Democratic Alliance will write to Premier, Refilwe Mtshweni-Tsipane to request that she provide us with a plan to improve service delivery outputs in the coming months as we approach the local government elections which are scheduled for this year.
Recently, Stats SA released the General Household Survey 2019 which revealed that between 2002 and 2019 those who had access to water in our province declined by 5.3% to 85.2%. As South Africans and residents of this province this report has highlighted that we are faced with a difficult choice and that is who we should vote for.
This task is made more difficult with leaders from all spheres of government making a vector of promises as a means to garner votes, but are these promises more than just politicking? In order to answer this, one has to look at the efficacy of their government.
The efficacy of any given government has to be determined based on the work which they are supposed to do and that is the delivery of basic services to its residents and as a result such the successes and failures can be judged based on previous terms served.
Water is a basic and fundamental human right which is enshrined in our constitution despite of the residents within Mpumalanga who till today do not have access.
The decrease was the worst in the country and it is contrary to the promises of increasing access to water whilst electioneering. In comparison, this is in direct contrast to the DA run Western Cape where the access to water was most common at 98.5%.
Having access to decent sanitation improves health and restores the dignity of any given community. It is very concerning that the General Household Survey once again noted access to sanitation as being most limited in Mpumalanga. The province’s access shockingly decreased from 68.1% in 2018 to 63.7% in 2019. Yet again the DA run Western Cape was the best in the country, having an access rate of 94.5%.
Given our tainted past it is clear that service delivery needs to be expedited and it is also clear that our government in Mpumalanga is failing when it comes to aspects of service delivery. It cannot be that we are twenty-seven years into democracy and instead of access to services increasing, it is declining.