Cape Town's lack of contract supervision and political oversight leads to problems of service delivery
The absence of project and contract direction and supervision in the Cape Town's Parks and environmental services departments and the lack of political oversight by ward and mayoral committee councillors of these departments is creating problems for quality of service. I will illustrate the problem - absence of contract specification and supervision - with Parks Department's tree pruning contracts but I believe it's also city-wide with contracts like invasive species control and soft - non-engineering - contracts. August is the last month to prune greenery and prepare gardens for summer. There's an old saying that when the city prunes public open space trees, it's time for homeowners to do theirs. But from what I've seen, it's best not to follow their modus operandi: over-cutting that damages trees. There's the right way and the wrong way to do it. The city and its contractors follow the principle that cutting more and more is always better even when it...