The Executive Mayor of the City of Matlosana Local Municipality, Councillor James Tsolela, handed over four new trucks worth R12.2 million to the Department of Community Services to accelerate service delivery on August 16.
During the handover, Tsolela was accompanied by Municipal Manager Lesego Seametso and some Members of the Mayoral Committee.
The four vehicles are two refuse trucks that will be used for the collection of refuse. One is a TLB for illegal dumping, and another, was a bulldozer truck that will be used at the landfill site in the City.
Tsolela said the vehicles would mainly assist in speeding up service delivery and help the municipality save costs on outsourcing service providers in the community services department.
"This is part of our initiative as the municipality in making sure that we bring necessary tools of the trade to strengthen and speed up service delivery to our community, and it is one of the municipality's objectives to make sure that we have trucks to reduce the number of private service providers that render services in our municipality.
"On the current assessment, for us to collect refuse without any challenges, we need about 30 refuse trucks. However, 15 trucks can make a huge difference, and these two add to the six trucks we already have as the municipality," he said.
The fleet of trucks in the City comes two months after the termination of the contract of the service provider appointed last year to render refuse services in the municipality.
"We had to terminate the service provider's contract because it failed to render services to our people, where they had to stay for a month without refuse removal, and we now have a service provider that is contracted for three months while we are still going on for a new tender to get a service provider that will render services to our people," said Tsolela.
He further said that despite their accounts being attached by Eskom, they are happy to announce that they were approved for debt relief and that their issues, as the municipality, with Eskom were resolved.
He said the debt relief helped the municipality to the point that Eskom had to pay back the money they had taken from them, based on the condition of the debt relief, and they are now continuing to pay their monthly debt to Eskom.
