30 September 2009.
The Presidency hotline has been up and running for just over two weeks.
On the
14 September 2009 the Presidency hotline opened for South African citizens to call in and lodge their queries or complaints about government inefficiency.
President Jacob Zuma is encouraging disgruntled citizens to call his office on a toll-free number (17737), to lodge their queries or complaints about inefficient service delivery in both local and provincial government departments. However, citizens are encouraged to submit their queries and complaints with these smaller government structures before calling the hotline, in order to ensure the process is kept as efficient as possible.
According to an article on
The Mail and Guardian Online, the hotline received more than 17 388 calls on its first day. The first couple of calls were answered by Zuma himself, who is quoted on
IOL News saying that "We have said we must be able to get back to a citizen within 36 hours, not necessarily with a solution but to give feedback. It is also important that at no point do we lose sight of that call."
However, there were a couple of glitches with the launch of the hotline.There is concern that the hotline is unable to handle the massive influx of daily calls. It proves to be almost impossible to get through, and callers are not told where they are in the queue of people waiting on the line. A potential reason for this, according to
IOL News, is that each call logs about 20 minutes, as detailed information needs to be captured from each caller to ensure that their complaint or query can be followed up on as effectively as possible.
News24 reports that Zuma hopes that once the hotline is working sufficiently that the volume of calls will go down as the government "should by then be more responsive, departments will have learnt the importance of responding quickly".
