ActionSA is pleased to announce that, in just four months, the highly successful A Re Sebetseng service delivery blitz campaign, under the committed leadership of ActionSA MMC Funzi Ngobeni has managed to repair the equivalent of 112 699 potholes across the seven regions of the City of Johannesburg.
Spearheaded by the Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA), the accelerated service delivery initiative filled 26 217 potholes and completed 21 620.65 m² of deep patching. The latter translates to 86 482 potholes (a standard JRA pothole measures in at 0,25 m²).
Other notable achievements of the JRA-led blitz campaign include:
Despite these achievements, MMC Ngobeni and his team have taken the decision to review how A Re Sebetseng will be rolled out beginning in July.
Currently, 90% of the JRA’s resources (general workers, fleet, and plant) are dedicated to a single region for a week or two – depending on the volume of work that needs to be completed – to focus on pothole repairs, deep patching, reinstatements, unblocking stormwater infrastructure, repairing, or completely rebuilding traffic signals and replacing damaged guardrails.
While this method was decided on to achieve maximum, visible impact in each region, the Department decided to review this model and introduce a 50/50 deployment.
This means, beginning July, JRA will deploy only half of its capacity during a regional blitz while the other half remain at their depots to complete repairs and maintenance in their respective regions. The blitz campaign will rotate from Region A up to G, without following any particular order.
It should be clearly understood that the original deployment method was intended to compensate for those depots that were under-resourced but crucially, to strike a serious blow against the service query backlogs that had accumulated during almost two years of Covid-19 restrictions when JRA general workers were unable to work on a full-time basis.
This was because JRA was not declared an essential service, meaning that routine repairs and maintenance could not take place as was expected. Therefore, in the absence of the 90/10 deployment, the City of Johannesburg would certainly have had regions with backlogs not addressed, resulting in actual skewed service delivery.
The recently allocated budget of R918 million for repairs and maintenance as well as R1.1 billion for capital projects will assist JRA to begin the difficult journey of addressing the City’s backlog of R37.7 billion for roads alone.
A Re Sebetseng has highlighted the glaring inter-regional and intra-regional infrastructure disparities that must be attended to with urgency.
Within the coming weeks, MMC Ngobeni will ensure that JRA produces its plans within the newly approved budget for improving our road network and present these plans to the residents of Johannesburg. This will be done for residents to believe in an improving road network regardless of regional or geographical considerations.
