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

Since municipalist praxis has increased, so has the use of electronic municipality (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 is an ongoing problematic issue signifying a misconception jostling for academic attention in the understanding of e-Municipality within the context of political settings, particularly in South African municipalities. From this perspective, it is necessary to clarify the confusion and obscuring of what’s at stake in relation to service delivery within municipalities. This study uses the adoption and implementation models for effective e-Municipality and the Public Value theory to position e-Municipality services in a sustainable context. Methodologically, the study adopted the qualitative research approach with the aid of secondary data gathered from scholarly journal articles, books, trusted websites, municipal databases (City of Tshwane), government legislations and peer-reviewed articles. With the City of Tshwane adopted as a case study, the researcher analysed data using online content analysis techniques to present eMunicipality (e-Tshwane) results. The findings reveal 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 accounts often results in a large number of disgruntled customers. To address this issue, this study recommends that the City of Tshwane find alternative online mechanisms to identify system faults to reduce the number of disgruntled customers and improve the level of usefulness of the eTshwane system. This study offers policy-makers in government some insights concerning the adoption and implementation of sustainable online services by addressing issues aimed at improving online mechanisms to eliminate physical contact at municipal offices to access services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]