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Nelson Mandela Bay executive mayor Retief Odendaal says the new coalition government has made significant strides in a short space of time in intensifying service delivery across the metro.
But he says the municipality will also need its residents’ participation in fixing the metro.
Speaking to Algoa FM News on Sunday, Odendaal said the municipality has launched the #GetNMBWorkingAgain initiative.
“Notwithstanding all of the progress we have made in such a short period of time, we need to do more to fix our metro,” said Odendaal.
“That is why we’ve launched #GetNMBWorkingAgain initiative. On the fifth of November we are hoping to get all residents to participate in a street sweeping initiative and we’ve asked that each resident sweep at least 50 metres of road on that day.
“If we can get just 10,000 residents to participate, we’ll be able to clean 500 kilometres of road.”
He said although the Bay has made progress in unblocking various service delivery aspects, it was “in a race against time to prepare itself for the summer season”.
“Not only has the metro managed to fix 9,000 of the backlog of 20,000 potholes, it has started to commence with various big road infrastructure works,” he said.
On Friday, the municipality officially launched the R2,5-million construction of Zambezi Street in Missionvale.
“Our coalition government is fully committed to ensure that sufficient funding is available to invest in infrastructure projects such as this, across the Metro, in order to improve the living conditions of our residents,” Odendaal said at the launch.
Elaborating more on service delivery, he said: “There are also currently four teams working in painting road sign markings on a daily basis. The metro has managed to fix some 4000 streetlights of the estimated 10,000 faulty streetlights that have left the metro dark and unsafe over the last couple of months.
“The municipality has started making progress with the fight against cable theft and has started to utilise aluminium cabling instead of the usual copper cabling which is far more sought after by vandals.
“The scourge of vandalism has led to dozens of traffic lights being out across the metro and the city will therefor launch pilot projects with vandal-proof traffic lights.”
