Programme Director,
Executive Mayor,
Mayors and speakers from all municipalities,
Esteemed Councillors,
Traditional leaders,
Invited guests,
Ladies and gentlemen.
Good day.
I would like to thank the Lephalale Local Municipality for the invitation to speak to you here today. I am indeed honoured to be among the hardworking officials and office bearers of this Local Municipality on this important day of the inauguration of the Mayor. I take this opportunity to congratulate the Mayor, Councillor Jack Maeko on his appointment. We welcome you to this important sphere of government.
We are confident that you will live up to the hopes and aspirations of our people and together we must drive forward and actualise our service delivery objectives in the Lephalale Local Municipality. Together we must accelerate the pace of change, work harder and better to move towards the vision we all aspire to. As a public representative, we expect of you to bring a conscious desire and determination to execute your responsibilities to the best of your ability in advancing the interest of your respective communities.
We are certain that you have already hit the ground running in ensuring that our people who remain destitute and desperate for services, have access to basic services such as water, electricity, health care and decent shelter. These are people who look up to us as Government to complement their livelihood. In their majority, they are unemployed and depend on Government grants and other social programmes for survival.
To them, we are the only solution and the much needed hope for their day to day survival. That is why we want all our public representatives to speak the plight of our people and be concerned about issues of service delivery. Our shared vision of 2014/15, which is a clean, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient local government system, should not be compromised.
This vision urges us to commit to Government's priorities of accelerating service delivery in order to meet national targets. As you all know by now, the key priorities we have include Education, Health, Rural Development, the fight against crime and creating decent work. Ladies and gentlemen, for this vision to be realised, firstly we need to take care of those cardinal factors that are indispensable, whether we like it or not, for driving municipal performance to a high level of service delivery.
There is a serious need for leadership to take responsibility to work together to solve the problems of the municipality. You will remember that South Africa's progress in navigating the transition from apartheid to democracy was built on the ability of leaders to put aside narrow sectarian interests in favour of national interest. The call here is to move away from silos and parochial planning and look at this municipality as one holistic entity that should develop comprehensively.
We must be a capable and developmental municipality that is professional, competent and responsive to the needs of every member of this community. Building a capable and developmental municipality means building the capacity of this local municipality to effectively implement its key priorities and programmes. We must do away with the tendency of outsourcing everything, including at times the things we are hired to execute.Ours is a common citizenship, common future and a common destiny, regardless of our differences we must unite and work together.
Community members have a role to play in their own development and in the development of this local municipality. The idea that people should sit back and wait for government to deliver is neither feasible nor consistent with people centred development.
Service delivery overview
Programme director, the current water and electricity backlogs for this municipality stand at 22.5% and 11% respectively which is substantial progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals. However, as you are aware infrastructure development remains a challenge for all municipalities across the country.
The upgrading of water and electricity supply to Lephalale town is currently underway at the cost of R300 million budgeted over the multiyear period. This will unlock the current development challenges and further ensure that the town is able to meet its water and electricity demand up to 2030. This municipality relies mostly on the municipal infrastructure grant for capital funding for basic services infrastructure.
During the 2011/12 financial year, Lephalale municipality managed to spend 97 percent of the MIG allocation which is substantial improvement compared to the 47 percent in the 2010/11 financial year. We must commend the excellent performance as it is within the acceptable budget expenditure norms and standards.
The Lephalale Infrastructure Master Plan which is the Scoping Report showing infrastructure investment planning project over the 20 years has been completed by the department in partnership with Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA). The Scoping Report made recommendations amongst othersto improve the road situation in Lephalale. There is a dire need to lobby for financial resources to address the road conditions in and around Lephalale.
We need to also take cognisance of the involvement of the initiatives by the private sector to assist the municipality with the upgrading of some of these roads. Of note, is the current expansion and upgrading of the Nelson Mandela Drive by both Eskom and Exxaro My department in 2011 assisted the municipality with an assessment of the capacity of the municipality to operate and maintain water service infrastructure as part of section 78(3) process.
The municipal leadership must take this process forward in order to improve overall management of the infrastructure. As part of the infrastructure development programme, the department is currently embarking on a province wide assessment of waste water treatment works. We can report that the process has been completed in Lephalale.
Operation clean audit
The Auditor-General, Mr Terrence Nombembe recently released the national 2010/11 audit outcomes report of municipalities and the report draws attention to critical areas of improvement that we need to focus on across our 30 municipalities. As a province, we are proud and have subsequently congratulated Fetakgomo and Waterberg municipalities for demonstrating good, sound financial and performance management capabilities as alluded to in the Auditor General's report.
Of great concern is the net regression in the number of unqualified audit opinions, which is reflected by the decrease from 10 to 5 municipalities with unqualified audit outcomes. As the AG reported this sad regression is largely due to lack of leadership, financial and performance management and governance.
This state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue. In this district, there are pockets of excellence contradicted by extremely negative performance. While we celebrate the fact that Waterberg District Municipality has joined Fetakgomo Local Municipality by achieving a clean audit, we have Modimolle and Belabela who received adverse and disclaimer respectively.
These two poor performing municipalities have no choice but to move to at least qualified audit report in the next audit cycle. The improvement recorded by Thabazimbi who moved from qualified to unqualified and Mookgopong who moved from disclaimer to qualified demonstrates that this target is achievable. The department will be providing hands on technical support as well as monitoring the performance of all the municipalities.
The department has commissioned four accounting firms over three years to assist all the municipalities to achieve clean audit by 2014. The performance contracts entered into with these accounting firms are output based so that we expedite delivery of the set targets as we approach 2014.
The scope of work of these resident accountants includes:
- To provide hands on support on technical financial management with regard to the closure of the financial year with specific emphasis that the municipality's financial records for that financial year are in order and ensure skills transfer,
- To assist with preparation of the financial statements
- To ensure that working papers are available before preparing the financial statements as evidence for auditing purposes.
- To assess the state of financial management in the municipality and provide recommendation on areas of improvement;
Strengthening municipal oversight - Municipal Public Accounts Committee
The establishment of Municipal Public Accounts Committee (MPAC) has been completed across the province and training and capacity development for the elected members has commenced. All municipalities are expected to create an enabling environment for this committee to function properly and meet the set deliverables.
In addition to the MPAC, all municipal councils are expected to ensure that there is sufficient oversight and provide strategic leadership to their municipalities. Municipalities should ensure that they comply with all statutory reporting requirements including the submission of report to Municipal Public Accounts Committees. The department working together with the Provincial Treasury monitors the filling of top management position in order to ensure compliance with the Municipal Systems Act Amendment Act 2011.
The bottom line and of importance here is that these critical management positions must be filled with officials with the necessary experience, competence and relevant qualification. In addition, the National Treasury issued Competence Regulation which provides an unambiguous framework for competence required for the filling of Section 57 managers in municipalities.
Further than that, we should stop recycling such managers who have bad performance record. We should also ensure that Budget and Treasury officials possess requisite skills in the following units: Supply Chain Management, Budget and Expenditure, Credit and Debt Controls, Risk Management and Internal Audit. Of great and serious concern in this municipality, is the filling of Technical manager's position which has been vacant for some time.
Municipal Council needs to fast track the process of filling all top management positions because delays in this case always end up being costly on service delivery. And during the recruitment process municipal leadership must ensure that these positions are filled by officials who have appropriate skills, expertise, competence and qualifications.
One amongst many of your responsibilities as a political leadership is to provide oversight and monitoring. This remains a major challenge not only in this municipality, but in many of our municipalities in the province. To the new mayor and all Councillors, never allow yourselves to be spoon-fed with information by administrators.
You must be critical of the information you receive at all times. You can only be critical if you make it your business to understand what is happening in the municipality. The foremost blue print document of the municipality is the IDP. The law requires you to develop and adopt the IDP as council. Coupled with the IDP is the budget. It naturally follows that you should know all the activities of the municipality as they are guided by this important document, the IDP. Equally important is the strengthening of the Provincial Political Oversight.
The province has to this end established a Provincial IGR Forum (MunMECs) which is constituted of MEC for CoGHSTA and Provincial Treasury. The Provincial IGR Forum is attended by District Mayors and Local Mayors on a quarterly basis. This forum monitors implementation of municipal audit remedial action plans; revenue and debt management issues as well as infrastructure grant expenditure.
It will also come in handy in complementing AG's work on governance and financial management issues. The capacity of councillors is very important in the performance of the municipality and the delivery of quality services for our people. On this score, we are rolling out capacity building training programmes for councillors. Chief among the programmes will be Principles of Strategic Management, Public Participation and Integrated Development Plan (IDP) and Principles of Financial Management, including Financial Management reporting and Supply Chain Management.
Councillors are called on to stop interfering with the Supply Chain Management processes or the appointment of staff in the organisation. Indeed many of the challenges and difficulties we face will surely require maximum unity and cooperation between and among us as representatives. You have a responsibility towards each and as councillors you must support the Mayor.
You must collectively ensure that administration under the leadership of municipal manager function better and properly. You and the collective can only be different from the rest if you introduce forward and integrated planning which will lead to increased and efficient expenditure of your budget.
It has been proven that lack of proper forward planning is the main reason for poor expenditure on Municipal Infrastructure Grant (MIG). Executive Committee (EXCO) decision no.12 of 2012/2013 states that: "Municipalities should develop forward planning for their capital/infrastructure projects, such that planning for projects is done in the outer year and implementation thereof is done in the following year".
This, ladies and gentlemen, will ensure that the allocated Municipal Infrastructure Grant (MIG) is spent to alleviate backlogs and improve the much needed access to service delivery. In conclusion, we all know the key challenges facing our communities and we call on those who are privileged to confront the desperate plight of society's have nots. It is my view that with better co-ordination and implementation, together we will be able to build better communities.
We wish you well in your responsibilities.
I thank you!
