The e-Municipality in South Africa as a Panacea for Adopting and Implementing Sustainable Online Services: A Case of the City of Tshwane

E-Municipality

Abstract

Since municipalist praxis has proliferated, so too have the use of e-Municipality with multiple political motives and municipalist monikers springing up across public administration. All this typological creativity in digital governance suggests a new and pre-paradigmatic way of empirical inquiry aimed at improving service delivery and enhancing good governance through means of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). However, there seem to an ongoing problematic issue signifying a misconception jostling for academic attention in providing an understanding of e-Municipality within the context of political settings particularly in South African municipalities. This is necessary in clarifying the confusion and obscuring of what’s at stake in relation to service delivery within municipalities. This study used the adoption and implementation model for e-Municipality and Public Value theory to position e-Municipality services. Methodologically, the study adopted the qualitative research approach with the aid of secondary data gathered from scholarly journal articles, books, trusted websites, municipal database, government legislations and peer-reviewed articles. With the City of Tshwane adopted as a case study, the researcher analysed data using the online content analysis techniques to present e-Municipality results. The findings reveals that, the e-Tshwane system’s failure to automatically update or reflect changes made by customers in relation to home addresses and payments made to municipal account often result into a large number of disgruntled customers. To address this issue, this study recommends that the City of Tshwane must find alternative online mechanism to identity system faults to reduce the number of disgruntled customers. This study offers policy-makers in government some insights in relation to the adoption and implementation of sustainable online services by addressing issues aimed at improving online mechanisms to eliminate physical contact at municipal offices in order to access services.