Filling potholes, cleaning up parks and finding and checking fire hydrants long submerged in sand are among the municipal functions local residents in the Roodepoort suburb of Weltevredenpark have tackled as their way of resisting citizen abuse.
Watch the video the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) has produced on the initiative of the Panorama Residents Association (PRA) in Weltevredenpark:
The IRR’s focus on this and other similar initiatives is intended to bring home to South Africans just how bad citizen abuse has become under the ANC government, where even the most ordinary municipal functions – such as repairing roads and cleaning parks – are often simply ignored.
PRA chairman Dave Baxter told the IRR team that a big problem in maintenance is the lack of supervision by the municipality of subcontractors appointed to fix infrastructure and clean the parks. The community themselves cut the reed beds in parks before the dry season when veld fires typically occur.
Realising that no-one knew where the fire hydrants in the area were, the PRA used maps to locate them, helped to uncover those that were buried under sand – Baxter notes that ‘Joburg water did turn up for that, and we appreciate it’ – and tested them to make sure they worked. Markers have been placed on the verges to indicate where the hydrants are.
The PRA (with permission from Joburg City Parks) fenced off parks where drug dealing was rife, and even set up a team for Victim Support when traumatic break-ins or suicides occurred in the area.
Does the municipality respond to issues reported by members of the community?
‘No,’ Baxter said, ‘we don’t get responses. I’ve got an issue which we’ve been trying to escalate for about three weeks – a pothole on one of the major busy roads where you have to physically drive to the other side of the road. And this is a busy road, and it’s on a blind corner.’
The IRR encourages communities either struggling with getting their municipality to attend to infrastructure and service delivery, or taking the initiative to fix things themselves and thereby acting to stop citizen abuse, to reach out to us. Doing so will enable us to use such examples to inspire other communities and arm us with the real-life examples of citizen abuse that will help to put pressure on the government. Together we can #StopCitizenAbuse.
[Image: Amy-Claire Morton]