Service delivery seeks divine intervention as Polokwane municipality closes for prayers

“All municipal customers are hereby notified of a three-hour closure of all municipal offices due to workplace interfaith prayer from 09h00 to 12h00 on Tuesday, 27th September 2022.”

This was the wording of a notification from the Polokwane municipality this week. It assured residents that essential services would not be affected by the shutdown.

A phone call from Daily Maverick to the municipal offices during the prayer period went unanswered. We gave up after 20 minutes of being on hold, with a recorded message periodically stating that the municipality was experiencing “high call volumes”.

When asked by Daily Maverick for the purpose of the prayer session, Polokwane municipal spokesperson Thipa Selala said that there had recently been an alarming “number of death cases that involve its employees”, and that “all in the municipality” needed to “come together to seek mercy in prayer to God”.



Selala added: “Whilst we accept death to be part of our lives, this experience cannot go on without seeking [a] divine intervention breakthrough”.

The spokesperson framed the interfaith prayer session — which involved Christian and Muslim religious leaders — as a “wellness” initiative which was permissible in terms of municipal human resources (HR) policies. He suggested further that the experience would have a positive impact on municipal service delivery.

“The municipality has a responsibility to its employees’ wellness, and therefore arranged the workplace session through the Employees’ Assistance section of the HR in order to offer healing and spiritual rejuvenation to excel in service delivery,” Selala stated.

This is not the first time that the embattled Polokwane municipality has turned to a higher power for assistance with earthly challenges.

In November 2021, it hosted a prayer session against gender-based violence, with the Polokwane Review reporting: “Jeanette Raseluma from the Polokwane Municipality’s special focus unit said the prayer service was important in the fight against GBVF [gender-based violence and femicide]”.

The wider Limpopo provincial government has also hosted numerous mass prayer sessions in the name of road safety.

The city of Polokwane is currently suffering acute water shortages, due partly to low dam levels but largely to infrastructure problems as a result of insufficient maintenance. Parts of the city have in recent months been without water for weeks at a time. This is a situation which is brewing into social and political instability: The Citizen recently reported that a number of community organisations and political groupings are “threatening to turn the city into a battlefield in order to get government’s attention”.