The impact of service delivery on the quality of lives of the community of Protea South, Soweto in Johannesburg in Gauteng Province

Abstract

Service Delivery in South Africa has been one of the critical concerns of the government lately. The departments have been unable to meet the targets as set in the major policies and strategies such as AsGISA, Millenium Goals of SA and other documents. The provision of basic services such as water, sanitation, housing, health and poverty as a whole were key to those service deliver plans. In spite of many attempts by different spheres of government, to deal with the problem, this proved to be failure. Issues such as poor interpretation of policies, corruption, maladministration of resources, lack of coordination and aligned programmes as well as lack of skills and monitoring by officials were to be dealt with in length in order to curb the problems of service delivery. The department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs came up with measures to speed up the process of delivering quality services to the communities of South Africa. This Turnaround Strategy was introduced in December 2009 and will hopefully deal with such problems. This is testimony to many protests by different residents in South Africa who are frustrated and in need of response by the government promises. This study attempts to outline the problems facing the development of human settlements in South Africa. This reveals that such service delivery problems are not unique and specific to individual settlement but are similar in all respects. Recommendations thereof may be specific and assist in the rapid finalisation of service delivery in Protea South. The contribution to be made by study will ensure that there will be no more protests and that each sector will have a better understanding of the other sectors.