Government’s Presidential Hotline must be accessible to all citizens and be responsive to their needs, says Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration.
The committee made the comments during the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation’s (DPME’s) briefing about the modernisation of the hotline.
Parliament’s committee told the DPME to call on mobile phone companies to assist in ensuring the resource is free of charge.
In addition, the department must incorporate social media and e-mail into the hotline’s services, as the fast-changing times demand.
Says the committee: “The DPME must resurrect the Presidential Hotline and ensure it meets the objective for which it was established in 2009.
“Furthermore, its benefits must translate into better government performance and the deepening of participatory democracy.”
Introduced in 2009, the hotline is meant to be a platform for citizens to voice theircomplaints about the quality of government services. It is supported by a network of public liaison officers in national departments, provinces and municipalities.
In 2020, the DPME decided to roll out a pilot in Limpopo that would make the hotline accessible via a mobile app and an unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) code.
At the time, the department said the app and USSD code would enable citizens to lodge service delivery complaints in all official languages and track their queries through a reference number. However, no details on the pilot’s progress or possible national rollout were divulged.
According to the DPME, budgetary limitations in previous financial years contributed to the hotline’s poor performance and lack of additional channels to access it.
The department, however, indicates it will consolidate the innovations suggested by the portfolio committee to improve the hotline’s performance and use the employment opportunity it represents, as identified by the committee.
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