Action SA has lambasted the City of Johannesburg after its call centre went offline, saying this is “deeply concerning and wholly unacceptable” while criticising the city’s financial management and investment in critical infrastructure.
The city, in response, says residents continued to access municipal services through its extensive network of customer service channels throughout the outage.
“At no stage were customer services suspended, as multiple alternative service platforms remained available,” it says.
However, Action SA's Johannesburg candidate for MMC for finance, Mpumi Edward, is especially concerned about the financial and governance implications of the outage.
“The City allocates hundreds of millions of rand annually towards information and communication technology, customer management systems and digital infrastructure,” she says.
“Technology is no longer a support function – it is a core municipal service. Failure to invest wisely, maintain systems properly and implement resilient contingency measures ultimately costs residents through declining service delivery and diminished public trust,” Edward adds.
The city’s governance has come under increasing scrutiny after the Auditor-General late last month flagged a regression in its audit outcomes and warned of weak financial controls, while National Treasury subsequently suspended part of Johannesburg’s funding because of persistent breaches of the Public Finance Management Act.
Action SA – a political party founded in 2020 by former Johannesburg mayor and “Black Like Me” founder Herman Mashaba – issued a statement on Sunday drawing attention to the outage, noting the city had given no estimated time for restoration.
Its statement comes ahead of the November local government elections. Johannesburg, despite being governed by an ANC-led coalition, remains one of the country’s most hotly contested metros, with no party holding an outright majority in the council.
Action SA campaigns on anti-corruption, service delivery and economic reform.
Can’t plan
Action SA says the call centre is the primary platform through which residents report service delivery failures and access critical municipal assistance. For thousands of Johannesburg residents, it is the gateway to reporting electricity outages, water leaks, sewer spillages, potholes, traffic signal failures and other service delivery emergencies, it states.
“When that system fails, residents are effectively cut off from the city they fund through their rates and taxes,” Edward says.
She calls the city out for its “admission” that there was no estimated time for restoration. “This points to either inadequate disaster recovery planning, poor ICT governance, or both,” she says.
“In a metropolitan municipality of Johannesburg’s size and economic significance, there should never be a situation where a critical customer interface can fail without an immediate contingency plan and clear communication to the public,” Edward adds.
In response to ITWeb on Action SA’s Sunday statement, the City of Johannesburg yesterday said its customer call centre had been up and running since Friday, once again assisting residents across all service channels following “technical glitches experienced last week”.
The city’s technical teams worked around the clock to resolve the matter, it says, calling the downtime “temporary”.
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