I hope I am speaking on behalf of the staff of Drakenstein Municipality when I am voicing my excitement on the re-launch of our website. I have always harbored a belief that serving our communities goes hand in hand with informing our communities. This website brings back to life a chance providing a window of information largely to our communities of what this administration does. It is going to be an important instrument of communication that we are going to use.
The basic business that municipalities are engaged with including our own is to serve the residents of that municipality in the best way that the municipality knows how to do. The service is aimed at improving the lives of its residents. That is the mandate local government has. Although a lot of work has been done towards improving the lives of its residents, Drakenstein Municipality acknowledges more still need to be done. In pursuit of doing that, our Municipality is guided by the Nationally set out key areas of focus, which are:
- Municipal Transformation and Development
- Service delivery and Infrastructure Development
- Local Economic Development
- Financial Sustainability and Viability
- Good Governance and Public Participation.
It has been my commitment that the best way to serve our communities is to stabilize the administration. A stable administration breeds happy employees. Happy employees generate productive staff. It was my resolve therefore that what we had two or three years ago, the challenges of people acting in positions of importance, the absence of strategic layer of management, the unhappiness of staff emanating from parity cases resulted from the amalgamation of smaller municipality to form Drakenstein Municipality and the general overworking of staff due to a number of vacancies that were put on hold because of job evaluation needed immediate attention.
It has been a long hard journey to get where we are now. It is therefore pleasing to announce that the top strategic layer of management is now in place, and steps are in advance to replace the acting heads of departments with permanent staff members. Furthermore progress has been made to correct the parity cases that have been a painful experience to a number of our workers. For once there is a positive atmosphere that is taking place in Drakenstein. This is very good for the productivity of our municipality and how we begin to serve our people.
Although the performance of the municipality has been satisfactory in the past year, there is room for improvement. The installation of the new strategic management layer together with the envisaged full appointment of the operational top management layer promises good return to our municipality.
When the curtains of Olympics came down last Sunday that send a strong message to the world in general and South Africa in particular that the next big world sporting event will only take place in South Africa. As Africa and South Africa in particular braces itself to host the greatest sporting spectacle, the FIFA Soccer World Cup, Drakenstein Municipality is changing gears and beginning to enhance its effort of availing itself as a possible base camp to one of the top twenty football nations. The mood and atmosphere is being generated in this part of the country that we are ready to assume that responsibility. The support from the locals is gaining speed and we will not rest until we are assured that our area has been identified as a base camp by participating country in the coming World Cup. These are exciting times to be in Drakenstein and everyone is invited to come and enjoy our hospitality.
Dr. Sidima Kabanyane
28 August 2008