Cape, on the occasion of the annual Vuna Awards, Carnarvon
30 November 2006
Programme Director,
MEC of Local Government and Housing, Mr Boeboe Van Wyk,
Mayors and councillors,
Senior management,
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen:
We are gathered here today to acknowledge and celebrate the significant
contribution made by all of us towards the national effort of achieving a
better life for all our people. We are here to recognise the Northern Cape
municipalities that have notably strived for service delivery excellence, but
to also implore those who fell short in qualifying to continue trying their
level best.
The second democratic elections which were held early this year showed an
increased voter turnout of 48,4 from the previous local government elections.
This indicates the willingness of our people to play a critical role in the
affairs of local government.
Such a positive indication gives all of us in government an impetus to
accelerate our efforts towards ensuring more effective service delivery having
the full support of the people we serve.
Informed by the benchmarks we set for our municipalities over the next five
years, three overarching strategic priorities for local government will be
implemented during that period. These priorities constitute a combination of
mainstreaming our practical hands-on support to all municipalities.
Strengthening and repositioning our structural and governance arrangements
with regard to how we interact with local government and refining the local
government policy environment and giving more attention to enforcement of the
law.
Mainstreaming hands-on support to local government must mean undertaking
specific tasks and actions by both national and provincial government, State
Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and other key stakeholder in a manner that is
reflected in the core business and organisational processes of these
institutions.
Part of this is that mainstreaming incorporates a vision of what must be
achieved by local government in 2011. In this regard we need to ensure that
South Africa should have a viable system of local government focused on service
delivery and development amongst others.
We must be on course through local government towards meeting the 2014
targets. The most important action that we have undertaken include specific
high level priority actions which have been identified to give effect to
mainstreaming hands-on support to local government.
We as the provincial government departments must reflect concrete support
actions to municipalities in the strategic and business plans and streamline
support to local government. Provincial government need also to priorities
their local government support by including key tasks in the Provincial Growth
and Development Strategy (PGDS) and continue together with national departments
co-ordinate, facilitate, direct and monitor the priority hands on support of
government to local government.
The South African Local Government Association (SALGA) in this regard has a
very crucial role to play in strengthening and supporting municipal political
leadership. It is imperative that all this support is informed by the concrete
actions identified in the revised Integrated Development Planning (IDP).
Building the technical capacity and capabilities of municipalities through
the mobilisation and deployment of appropriate technical expertise will be
short term to medium term. As we seek to integrate and co-ordinate our work
better, we must identify the roles that will be played by each one of us at
national and provincial government in order to assist our municipalities.
Thus our key mission should be to drive the process of co-ordinating
municipal service delivery and ensuring collaboration so that all players,
national and provincial departments, parastatals and municipalities make the
most impact within the municipal space.
Our challenge as government now is to achieve co-operative government by
working together to co-ordinate infrastructure provision and service delivery
so that in each municipal area, everyone knows who is doing what and what the
timeframes are for implementation.
In this way, housing developments will not take place where Eskom has no
immediate plans to roll out power and the provincial government has not made
provision for schools and clinics and the municipality's application for
Municipal Infrastructure Grant (MIG) funding has not been made on time.
In this regard there are key initiatives that have been put in place to
ensure such co-ordination namely the Intergovernmental Relations Act which came
into effect on the 15 August 2005, this was followed by the Strategic Plan for
Local Government (2006 to 2011) which was adopted by the national Cabinet
Lekgotla.
This outlines key strategic priorities for local government for the next
five years (2006 to 2011). The presidential Izimbizo since 2005 has had a great
impact in dealing with performance culture within municipalities that can be
complemented with community empowerment which is what we are about here
today.
Programme Director, the Vuna Awards inspires us to strive for even better
performance in our quest for excellence in serving our people. It is very
significant because it is designed to encourage and spur on action in our
municipalities to enhance and revolutionise service delivery to our
communities.
The competition which began in 2003 provides us with an opportunity to
celebrate municipal excellence and benchmark municipalities against the best in
their categories.
The awards measure performance in a number of areas such as infrastructure
development and service delivery, local economic development, municipal
transformation and institutional development, financial viability and good
governance.
As government we have set ourselves the task to eradicate poverty and
inequality, to build prosperity, to promote the social, political and economic
empowerment of all our people through delivery of quality services, community
participation, promotion of local economic development and smart
administration.
We were bound in ensuring that we put in place and operate a system of
governance that addresses those key imperatives.
This vision has committed us to tackle poverty by beginning to eradicate the
vast backlogs in basic household infrastructure and service delivery which we
had inherited from our apartheid past.
It is common knowledge that municipalities are at the coalface of government
delivery, the first line of government delivery and are the ones who will make
a dent in government efforts to bring a better life to poor communities.
Our municipalities are the closest we get to our people and they should take
the lead in addressing the critical issue of how we provide services to our
people. Some municipalities are faced with a serious challenge of a lack of
public confidence.
I want to reiterate my previous assertion that in order to meet our
development goals there will have to be special attention to strengthening
local government. There must be continued co-operation of all three spheres of
government to ensure that each and every district and municipality has a
realistic IDP, a credible Local Economic Development (LED) programme, the
material and human resources as well as the management and operational systems
to implement these IDPs and LEDs.
We must ensure better integration of planning and implementation across the
three spheres of government as a priority for the term of the new local
government.
We also need to empower local government to meet its developmental and
service delivery obligations, drawing lessons of project consolidate, the
hands-on programme of support for local government.
This includes urgently dealing with the shortage in many municipalities of
properly qualified managers and professional and technical personnel. This will
put us firmly on the path to the realisation of our collective vision of a
better life for all.
The commitment to pursue a developmental local government has in essence
ensured that we formulate longer term desirable state of municipalities whilst
dealing with pressing imperatives such as viability, integration of local
development plans, setting up and ensuring operation of advisory networks
thereby deepening public participation
Programme Director, in these 12 years we have also learned that for local
government services to be sustainable we have to develop a partnership with our
people.
They must take active part in planning, implementing, operating and
maintaining these developmental programmes.
They must own them and control them. It thus becomes our duty to inform,
educate, mobilise them and empower them to take that control.
The challenge is for all of us to become active agents of change, to become
builders of a new people centred society, working together, united in action to
push back the frontiers of poverty.
We, therefore, extend our hand to business, religious communities,
non-governmental organisations (NGOs), unions and all freedom loving people to
work together with us in the interest of our common destiny and our common
future.
We seek to socialise local government to its assigned mandate of providing
services, creating conditions for socio-economic development and therefore
addressing poverty through locally driven economic development initiatives.
In line with our Constitution, we had prioritised the basic needs of our
people especially the improvement in the provision of water and decent
sanitation, electricity, waste removal, proper roads and transport, improvement
of basic municipal infrastructure and the building of houses to facilitate
government's plan of building sustainable communities and the upgrading of
informal settlements by 2014.
All of us provincial government, local government and the rest of civil
society and patriotic individuals should act together now to eradicate the
indignity of joblessness, poverty and hunger by making local government work
better. We have the task of changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of our
people.
We shall not rest until we have effective and efficient local government
machinery in place throughout the province that is responsive to the needs of
our people and improve their quality of life.
We will remain actively involve on matters that will permanently improve the
capacity of local government to help accelerate social transformation.
In conclusion, we have joined together in the sphere of local government to
reflect and rejoice to some formidable responses to objective challenges
against service delivery, to learn and commit to cross-pollinate and
improve.
We wish to encourage those who took part to continue doing so, showcase the
good work of municipalities and to urge those who did not take part that
participating in this competition will help them to enjoy the confidence of
their communities particularly the poor.
I thank you!
Issued by: Office of the Premier, Northern Cape Provincial Government
30 November 2006
