In its effort to strengthen municipal support and improve effectiveness in terms of Section 154 of the Constitution, the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs is convening one-on-one engagement sessions with all municipalities in the province to provide support and strengthen their capacity of municipalities to manage their own affairs.
The engagement sessions which are graced by the attendance of Municipal Managers, Municipal Infrastructure Support Agent - MISA, South African Local Government Association - SALGA, Provincial Treasury as well as the Department of Water and Sanitation, were held under the theme “Strengthening municipal support programme to improve its effectiveness”.
Addressing municipalities during the sessions, Head of Department Dr Ben Bole said the engagement sessions are aimed at having a frank and honest discussion to find solutions to challenges facing municipalities.
“We have crafted specific objectives to restore order and stability in municipalities. Information must not be held back so that we can assist and support in order for municipalities to uphold their constitutional mandate of providing services to communities without fail”, said Dr Bole in his opening remarks of the sessions.
He further indicated that they decided on one-on-one engagements because the methodology that was used in the previous years has not yielded any positive results and it cannot be business as usual.
“We have the responsibility to support local municipalities because a crisis in any municipality is a crisis of the department. We can only craft intervention measures that are effective for different municipalities as long as we know the challenges that we are facing in our municipalities”, remarked Dr Bole.
All municipalities detailed progress reports on the implementation of the improvement plans and financial recovery plans. They outlined their service delivery and financial capacity, vacancies in the municipality including that of senior managers, delivery of municipal infrastructure projects, servicing Eskom debt and other challenges they might be facing.
The objective was to verify and validate the state of affairs, assess, review and develop new improvement plans on the state of each municipality for improved collaboration and accountability.
After deliberations on the state of municipalities in Dr Kenneth Kaunda and Ngaka Modiri Molema districts, Dr Bole appreciated the advice and directives provided to municipalities by different stakeholders to rectify their challenges. He maintained that constant engagement sessions will assist the department to track the performance of municipalities in order to provide the necessary support.
“We will continue to hold these sessions to support municipalities because a collapse of one municipality is the collapse of national government and its entities. Therefore we must support and strengthen the capacity of municipalities in order for them to perform their functions’, concluded Dr Ben Bole.
Enquiries:
Tumelo Maruping
Cell: 079 984 5807
Dineo Thapelo
Cell: 072 218 2559
