Service delivery challenges in Gezubuso rural area of Msunduzi municipality

Abstract

The local government, ward councillors and traditional leaders are considered as the first levels of point of communications which is closer to the people and expected to deliver the needs of the people. The lack of municipality resources/equipment, training of municipal employees, community engagements and the exclusion of the community in decision-making contribute service delivery challenges in the Msunduzi Municipality. The service delivery challenges of the municipality, induna (chief) and ward councillors have certain elements that do not easily satisfy the needs of the people if they are not solved effectively. During the data collection it was found that the majority of community members who participated in this study had a negative response towards the assessments of their level of satisfaction with regards to the services delivered to them. Some individuals did not have negative responses to some of the questions due to personal reasons. The induna lost interest in participating because he mentioned that the majority of the community decisions are taken by the councillor and as he is newly appointed. He has not performed all his duties as yet. The rationale of this study is to suggest measures to be implemented to address service delivery backlogs. The mixedmethods approach and the triangulation mixed method design was used for this particular study in order to get sufficient depth and detail of service delivery issues in the municipality. A sampling size formula developed by Sekaran (2016) was used to determine that 61 participants formed an appropriate sample size for this study. Purposive sampling was used for this study because the whole population and sampling frame were available. The primary data was collected through self-administered questionnaires that were personally administered to the community members by the researcher. Primary data was also collected by conducting interviews with the municipality employees, ward councillor and induna. Based on the findings of the study it was recommended that future researchers use this research as a case study in other areas from other municipalities in order to understand the role of municipalities in stimulating service delivery