Gauteng residents are being denied their Constitutional Right to submit an online request or a compliant on service delivery matters by the Gauteng Provincial Legislature (GPL) as its e-Petitions online portal has not been working for several weeks.
The e-Petitions portal allows Gauteng residents to lodge complaints about unresolved service delivery issues to the Gauteng Provincial Legislature (GPL).
With this system down, Gauteng residents are now not able to lodge a petition if they are experiencing service delivery issues with any Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG) departments and municipalities.
Currently, the Petitions Committee has 736 ongoing petitions, of which over 70% have been inherited from the previous legislative terms.
This is deeply worrying as many of the petitions brought before the committee pertains to RDP house allocations and service delivery issues.
In addition, it also means that many of our residents are waiting a very long time to gain access to dignified housing and basic service delivery.
Failure to attend to the resident’s petitions will result in an increase in service delivery protests as residents become unhappy with the status quo.
The huge backlog currently being experienced by the Petitions Committee will only get bigger given that the committee has a target of adopting 120 petitions for the year.
The DA will be working with their counterparts in the local government where issues of service delivery have been raised with the Petitions Committee to ensure that they are resolved speedily. In addition, we will also be tabling questions in the GPL to ascertain why the e-Petitions portal is not working and what measures are being put in place to address the current backlog.