Durban - SA Local Government Association (Salga) KwaZulu-Natal chairperson Thami Ntuli has welcomed the acknowledgement by President Cyril Ramaphosa that several municipalities needed interventions to turn them around.
The lobby group said they had been encouraged by the president’s frank response, but stressed that they wanted to see more action.
In his State of the Nation Address (Sona), Ramaphosa said the poor performance of many local governments remained an area of concern.
He noted that too many of the country’s municipalities, 163 out of 257, were dysfunctional or in distress due to poor governance, ineffective and sometimes corrupt financial and administrative management and poor service delivery.
He indicated that the government was implementing a number of interventions to address failures at local government level and improve basic service delivery and this would include enhancing the capacity of public representatives and officials, maintaining and upgrading local infrastructure, and invoking the powers of national government to intervene where municipalities failed to meet their responsibilities.
He emphasised that a professional public service, staffed by skilled, committed and ethical people, was critical.
“In response to the state capture commission and in line with the framework for the professionalisation of the public service, integrity assessments will become a mandatory requirement for recruitment to the public service and entry exams will be introduced.”
Ntuli said such moves had the potential to make local government stronger.
“We have always insisted that because of its critical nature, local government should have the highest skills that are available so that municipalities become viable, are able to generate their own revenue and meet service-delivery ambitions,” said Ntuli.
He decried the current funding model which he argued favoured national and provincial layers of government, leaving the local sphere with a pittance with which to deliver services to communities, many of which were poor.
“The fact is we have heard a lot of talk about how local government is at the coalface of service delivery, but that has not necessarily been accompanied by the injection of resources including appropriately qualified and suitable individuals to drive service delivery in this critical sphere,” said Ntuli.
According to Ntuli, while there were worrying episodes in some municipalities, there were pockets of excellence where some municipalities were securing unqualified audit opinions, with some even recording clean audits.
DA Member of Provincial Legislature (MPL) Martin Meyer said many of the problems at local government had been allowed to continue for a long period.
“Unfortunately, I have zero confidence in the president because he does not have control on what happens at municipalities and that means the problems continue to persist.”
He noted how eThekwini had been cited for poor administration of water by the Office of the Auditor-General, and how a number of municipalities were under administration.
EFF’s Nkululeko Ngubane said there needed to be political will in order to fix local government problems.
“So our position is that what we heard from the president is something we have heard time and time again and do not believe that anything will change.”