Present to welcome the visitors was the Speaker of the council, Constance Bapela, and the member of the mayoral committee for shared and corporate services, Mally Mokoena, who chaired the meeting. The groups gathered held at Metro Centre on Monday, 21 May. The chairperson of the municipal public accounts committee, Scelo Gcabashe, was also there.

Bapela said that continuous visits by other municipalities to learn from Joburg were a sign that the City was outstanding. “We are honoured to hosts visitors from other municipalities, to learn and share ideas. This shows that Joburg is doing things differently.”

Various City experts spoke on a range of topics, most of which fell under the shared and corporate services directorate. The first presentation was by Joburg’s specialist on performance management group strategy, policy and relations management, Siyasanga Giyose.

He spoke about strategies in performance and evaluation in Johannesburg, which are aimed at tracking the performance of individual employees and of its entities. His department’s mandate was to keep employees on their toes in and to keep records of the entities. “It ensures that the culture of evaluation is stirred within the City.”

The visitors listened with great interest, making notes during the presentations. They asked questions and sought clarity from Joburg’s representatives. The director of corporate services in the visiting municipality, Mthunzi Mthwalo, said: “We learned a great deal from the City of Joburg. We hope to maintain this relationship to continue sharing ideas.

Service delivery
“There are few areas that we need to improve on as municipalities, such [as] issues of performance and evaluations in order to advance service delivery,” he said.

Read more: Vuyo Mlokoti, the group executive in the corporate and shared services directorate, spoke about the unit. “It is about consolidating discipline. It is about ensuring compliance and order. Corporate services ensure that the municipality functions well.”

Another speaker was the deputy director of the Integrated Development Plan (IDP) and business planning group strategy, policy and relations department, Msizi Myeza. He explained how Joburg formulated its five-year IDP and how it contents resonated with those of the Growth and Development Strategy, Joburg 2040.

“We engaged the community about the draft IDP through the community stakeholder forum. On these platforms they were able to tell us what they wanted done, and we made amendments, the same way we did with GDS 2020 consultations.

“We have a mandate in Joburg to change the course. Changing the course means changing the way we do things. It is about how we rehabilitate ourselves and build capacity,” said Myeza.

Other speakers included the City’s deputy director of group corporate and transactional shared services, who explained the human resources shared services model, and the group head of legal and contracts, Mbulelo Ruda, who spoke about legal issues.