JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA (ADV) – South Africa’s Home Affairs Minister, Dr Siyabonga Cwele, and the Executive Mayor for the City of Johannesburg, Councillor Herman Mashaba have pledged to put the country forward despite their different political jackets.
Dr Cwele is a senior member of the ruling party African National Congress while Councillor Mashaba represents opposition part Democratic Alliance (DA).
Minister Cwele is spearheading a programme of partnering with provincial and local governments to improve the service delivery to citizens.
Earlier on today, Cwele and Mayor Mashaba held a joint meeting as part of a service delivery monitoring visit to the Randburg Home Affairs office they shocked everyone by agreeing to forge closer working relations on areas of mutual interest.
“We need to work with councillors because they directly interact with citizens on a daily basis. In Gauteng, there are 94 000 uncollected identity documents (IDs), most of these are in Johannesburg,” said Cwele.
“The partnership with the City will help us to reach out to many of these people to remind them to come and collect their IDs.”
Meanwhile, Mayor Mashaba invited Home Affairs officials to work with the City officials from early next week to fine tune a strategy to encourage people of Johannesburg to collect their IDs.
Cwele and Mashaba also agreed to tackle challenges on immigration.
“Since coming into office, I have worked to highlight Johannesburg’s pressing immigration challenges and their impact on all our residents. I am glad that Minister Cwele has agreed to heed our call and I hope that this will be first of many engagements which will bring solutions to these challenges,’’ said Mashaba.
Cwele and Mashaba echoed that foreign nationals who come into the country through legal means are welcome. However, those who come into the country illegally are not.
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