The City of Johannesburg aims to develop cohesive leadership between its executive council and municipal entities to ensure accountability and coordinated service delivery, city manager designate Trevor Fowler said on Wednesday.

The city’s management strategy was also aimed at managing and responding better to customer and public expectations through the introduction of structural organisational changes.

“We aim to attract economic opportunities to Johannesburg and this can only be done by ensuring that administration, both of the city and at the municipal level, is held accountable to deliver on commitments,” he said.

Finance portfolio head Geoffrey Makhubo said the council would release its medium-term budget in October, which would focus on service delivery, development and inculcating a work-oriented culture among managers and staff.

“There is a need to accelerate service delivery to deal with the problems that were communicated during the recent local government elections, specifically around coordination between various bodies. For example, traffic lights must work but, while the Johannesburg Roads Agency is fixing the problem, the Johannesburg Metro Police must control traffic to ensure mobility of citizens.

“This translates to introducing excellence in service delivery so that it becomes the norm. This is also non-negotiable and is aimed at increasing confidence in government,” Makhubo said.

The city officials conceded on Wednesday that revenue collection remained a concern.

“We need to ensure that revenue collection is complete and correct. We need to restore the confidence of our customers in the city. We aim to create a financially sustainable city and to make Johannesburg a globally competitive city,” said Makhubo.

City of Johannesburg acting group CFO Lungelwa Sonqishe said the city’s operational performance grew 24% on the back of increased rates and taxes, as well as increased bulk purchases of services.

However, owing to the city’s implementation of an integrated accounts system, specifically the SAP enterprise software system, there was a significant jump in debtors as customers challenged the new billing system.

“Most of the problems around billing are not around improving the system, but around the management of processes that need to be aligned, as well as training our people to understand the system. If we improve the management of the processes and train our people to use the new system, it will yield positive results with regards to revenue collection,” she added.

The billing crisis, which climaxed last year, saw many residents receive incorrect billing statements over several months. Many people did not receive bills at all, hurting the city’s revenue.

“We have to get back to running the city like a business by ensuring that when bills are sent out they are accurate, engaging with customers and citizens on those issues and ensuring that we can correct queries timeously, while also ensuring that we correct the debt deficit,” said Fowler.

He said that an independent review of the city’s financial situation was under way. “We will examine the review and produce a timeline for implementing the city’s development strategy in October.”

Fowler emphasised the need for engagement with all investors, stakeholders, businesses and citizens, and admitted that the city had not effectively done so in the past.

Further, some of the key goals of the council would be to evaluate current institutional arrangements in terms of cost effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability of service delivery, as well as assessing the cost effectiveness of current municipal entities’ governance and oversight processes.