Week 5: A downward spiral as the Presidential Hotline loses our reports

While there has been a decrease in the number of attempts it takes to reach an operator at the Presidential Hotline, the improvement is slight. Out of 51 connected calls only 6 were answered by an operator.

All in all, the Democratic Alliance (DA) has spent close to 13 hours (749 minutes) trying to reach the presidential hotline over the past five weeks.

As it undertook to do when President Jacob Zuma first launched the initiative, the DA has tried to use the hotline to register a series of serious complaints with the Presidency, and has heeded the presidency's call to pursue other avenues first.

The results of the DA's attempts are:

• In five weeks we have been able to register five complaints. We have reference numbers for two of them, despite repeated promises that they will be sent through to us. The lack of a reference number suggests the complaint has not been properly registered and thus cannot be tracked and the response to it gauged.
• Outside of those four complaints, the DA has phoned the hotline a total of 51 times, with only 6 calls reaching an operator. These 51 calls translate into 749 minutes on hold; or 12 hours, 48 minutes.
• The first complaint registered by the DA, regarding the appointment of Paul Ngobeni, was lost in the system and had to be re-registered. The reference number is 1952293 and we will be following up on the progress on this case in a month's time.

A full summary of all the DA's calls, to date, follows below this statement.

At protests in impoverished Mpumalanga townships, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protestors, wounding several who were demanding better sanitation, electricity and housing. When asked how else the protestors should make their problems known, Zuma's spokesman Vincent Magwenya stated: "There are avenues available to communities to engage government on challenges they face in service delivery and we encourage communities to use the presidential hotline."

If the hotline is not an effective tool to register complaints, and when complaints eventually get registered they are still not addressed, how can citizens wanting better service delivery be expected to hold for hours, knowing that they are wasting their time?

We will continue to report back on the situation.

Statement issued by Democratic Alliance parliamentary leader, Athol Trollip, MP, October 18 2009

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