Programme Director
President and the National Office Bearers
The leadership of the ANC, SACP and COSATU
The Mayor of Mangaung
Delegates
Two days before we celebrate the historic 1956 women march against the extension of pass laws to women in our country, the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) has gathered here at the place where the umbilical cord of the African National Congress is buried for its 10th National Congress. We wish to take this opportunity to salute the South African Municipal Workers Union on its 25th Anniversary.
The formation of the South African Municipal Workers Union, coinciding with the 75th Anniversary of the ANC in 1987 was somewhat in tandem with the declaration by the ANC NEC which had designated 1987 as the Year of Advance to People`s Power.
As Oliver Tambo had said on the occasion of the 75th anniversary, that decision constituted a challenge both to the ANC leadership and to the masses of our country actually to advance towards our goal of the transfer of power to the people.
We wish to join the millions of our people in paying homage to our women for their struggle for women emancipation from the triple oppression characteristic of our apartheid-colonial past. As we do so, we recommit ourselves to continue the advance for the total emancipation of women noting as we do, the progress that we have already made since 1994.
The election of the first Female chairperson of the African Union Commission is indeed testimony to the strides we are making in unleashing the full potential of women as equal citizens of our country; continent and our world.
Just three days ago, this town witnessed the reincarnation of the first march by women which took place in 1913, against the oppressive pass laws being introduced at the time. In memory of that historic event and in honour of the woman who organised and led that very first protest action, Maitland Street was renamed the Charlotte Maxeke Street.
Programme Director!
In localising priorities of the 2009 ANC election Manifesto and in meeting key challenges facing our communities, the ANC committed itself to:
- Build local economies to create more employment, decent work and sustainable livelihoods.
- Improve local public services and broaden access to them.
- Build more united, non-racial, integrated and safer communities.
- Promote more active community participation in local government, and
- Ensure more effective, accountable and clean local government that works together with national and provincial government.
For the past 17 years, government has been engaged in ongoing initiatives of improving the legislative and governance framework that would allow local government to fulfill its Constitutional obligation as well as meeting the basic needs of our people.
Some remarkable progress has been made in changing the face of local government in South Africa. We are however not oblivious of the ongoing challenges we are still facing at this level both in terms of the ability of local government to meet its obligations of providing basic services to our people as well as in participatory governance.
In 2009, the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (CoGTA) conducted a capacity assessment of all our municipalities to ascertain the key problem statement in different thematic areas and to establish the root causes for poor performance, distress or dysfunctionality in municipalities.
Consequently, cabinet adopted the Local Government Turnaround Strategy which seeks to renew the vision of developmental local government by improving the organisational and political performance of municipalities and in turn the improved delivery of services.
The Local Government Turnaround Strategy is intent on improving the lives of citizens, and progressively meet their social, economic and material needs, thereby restoring community confidence and trust in government. I should emphasis here that the Turnaround Strategy builds on the experiences and lessons learned from project consolidate.
The Local Government Turnaround Strategy identified five areas of focus to change the face of local government for the better. These are:
- Financial Management
- Fighting corruption
- Enhancing Good Governance
- Accelerating Service Delivery
- Infrastructure Development
Government launched the Operation Clean Audit Initiative in 2009, with a target of all municipalities achieving unqualified audit opinions on their annual financial statements by 2014. To this effect, CoGTA is partnering with various stakeholders such as the National Treasury, the Auditor General, The Association of Public Account Committees, Provincial Treasuries, Provincial CoGTA’s and Premier’s Offices, as a concerted effort to support municipalities towards achieving clean audits in 2014.
Operation clean audit inspired focus, and over the past three years, initiatives were launched to support the achievement of the clean audit goal at local government level. Operation clean audit was launched against the backdrop of the many advances made in transforming local government since 1994 both in terms of legislative reforms as well as financial and performance reporting practices.
About two weeks ago, the Auditor General released the 2010/11 Local Government audit outcomes report which highlighted on a number of challenges that we are still phased with at this sphere of government. Amongst others, the Audit outcome report makes the following findings and conclusions.
- Five district municipalities, eight local municipalities and four municipal entities received clean audit reports. These auditees, however, represent only 5% of auditees in the country.
- None of the municipalities in the Eastern Cape, Free State, Gauteng, Northern Cape and North West received clean audit reports.
- Fifty-two (17%) auditees improved on their 2009/10 audit outcomes, but 38 (13%) regressed.
- One hundred and twenty-nine auditees (46%) were able to retain a financially unqualified audit opinion but these auditees failed to make any further progress towards clean audit reports for the year under review.
- Ninety-three per cent of auditees had findings on material non-compliance with laws and regulations.
- Unauthorised, irregular or fruitless and wasteful expenditure was incurred by 86% of auditees. Eighty-four per cent of the auditees did not take reasonable steps to prevent this type of expenditure.
- Inadequate management of vacancies and acting positions was identified at 34% of the auditees.
- Key personnel at more than 70% of the auditees did not have the required competencies to perform their duties.
We take this opportunity to salute those municipalities that have made improvements in their financial and performance reporting while urging those that are still lagging behind to attend to the issues raised by the Auditor General. We are however worried about the 13% that has regressed with regards to their audit outcomes.
These audit outcomes poses serious challenges to us as a Ministry and I suppose it equally poses serious challenges to you as a union especially given some of the poignant issues that were picked up by the Auditor General. It is worrisome that none of our Metropolitan Municipalities are amongst the 13 which received a clean audit. Equally worrisome is the fact that five of our provinces could not produce a single Municipality with a clean audit.
When the Auditor General says that about 91% of the Municipalities depended on consultants to balance their books while they have employed staff to do the same job, both ourselves and SAMWU should be worried. When the Auditor general asserts that about 70% of officials in key positions in audited Municipalities were found to be incompetent, indeed, we should be worried.
The National Treasury has been mandated by Cabinet to manage the deployment of finance experts to municipalities through the Municipal Finance Improvement Programme, as well as securing sound and sustainable management of the fiscal and financial affairs of municipalities through the Local Government Financial Management Grant (FMG).
Comrades!
We are worried about weak financial management and reporting at local government level as this impact negatively on its ability to deliver services to communities. In this regard, we have developed a framework on municipal public accounts committees to provide guidance to municipalities on the establishment and work of these committees.
Municipal public accounts committees aim to strengthen financial management by improving oversight over financial affairs of the municipality. To date, we have conducted workshops in all our provinces on the establishment and functioning of Municipal public accounts committees and some notable progress has been registered with regards to establishment of these committees across our municipalities.
In our policy guideline, “Ready to Govern”, the ANC proclaimed: “Local government staff will have to be properly trained, if they are to deal effectively with the development and government challenges facing them. This will require a nationally coordinated training effort. Such training will also have to address the question of affirmative action within these bureaucracies. In addition, training should include capacity building in communities to enable them to effectively participate in local structures and policy development processes.”
Judging by the findings of the Auditor-General and the challenges that we are aware of with regards to attracting skilled personnel at local government level, there is an urgent need to prioritise the training of local government staff, including targeted provision of bursaries to students studying towards any qualification of relevance to local government especially financial management, town and regional planning as well as engineering studies.
As Martin Luther King Jr. would tell us, “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
The Ministry of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs remains committed to provide leadership and guidance to our Municipalities in dealing with the challenges that they are facing with regards to financial and performance reporting. In this regard, we wish to call upon the leadership of SAMWU, South African Local Government Association (SALGA) and other stakeholders in the local government sphere to partner us in finding long lasting solutions to the challenges facing Municipalities in our country.
Over the recent past, we have witnessed a surge in local protests across the country some of which have resulted in destruction of public and private property. This government would be amongst the first to defend the right of people to protest action as enshrined in our Constitution.
We wish to condemn in the strongest possible terms any destruction to property as this simply borders on criminality. In this regard, we also wish to make a clarion call to the South African Municipal Workers Union to work with us in finding long lasting solutions to the root causes of these local protests.
We wish to unequivocally state to this Congress our findings that not all local protests are necessarily related to service delivery issues. It is thus important to take the context of each protest into account whenever they occur. The issue of inclusivity of communities in the local planning programme of municipalities is critical in this regard, because good co-operative governance is not just between the agencies of government, but between the state and its citizens as well.
In response to these local protests, and in our endeavour to deepen our understanding on the challenges facing our Municipalities, we took a decision to organise a series of stakeholder engagement summits in all our provinces.
It is our expectation that these summits should assist us in mobilising a range of stakeholders to join forces with government in assisting our municipalities and communities to find each other and dialogue more.
Democratic local government means more than just having the right to vote in a local election. It also includes a high degree of accountability, transparency and the right to participate in decision-making processes which affect communities between elections.
In this regard, this Congress would have made a meaningful contribution towards addressing challenges of communications between Municipalities and communities by assessing the functionality and efficacy of our system of ward committees as well as the Community Development Workers deployed in all our wards.
Chairperson!
Government has resolved to establish a Municipal Infrastructure Support Agency to provide technical support to municipalities with special focus on the 21 priority district municipalities.
Over the medium term, our focus will be on deploying technical experts to targeted municipalities to assist them with project planning, implementation and infrastructure asset management as well as providing training for technical staff in municipalities.
We believe that building capacity within local government to construct, develop and maintain infrastructure is important for the delivery of basic infrastructure in a sustainable manner.
It is our firm belief that participatory governance and the bridging of the gap between Municipalities and communities will go a long way in dealing with the local community protests in our communities.
In this regard, we will be strengthening the capacity of ward committees by providing a series of targeted and accredited training programmes and developing a proposal for a refined legislative framework for ward committees.
In his address to the 38th National Congress of the ANC, President James Moroka remarked: “It is the duty of all Africans (especially those who by reason of their education have a clear grasp of those issues which vitally affect the Africans of this land) to show interest and to take active part in the furtherance of the welfare of the Africans. You must all realise that whilst the other people can help you in your direction towards your National ideals, upon you and you alone lies the ultimate salvation of your individual selves and of your nationhood. From this preliminary statement must be drawn the threadbare but fundamental inference that you, Africans, must be organised more and more solidly so that you may better forge those means and instruments by which you may carve your way to your destiny.”
The words by President Moroka may need to be contextualised to the challenges that we are currently faced with as a ruling party and Congress movement as we move towards celebrating the second decade of freedom. To what extent were we able to diagnose the challenges that were to confront us as we prepared to take over government when we proclaimed that we were ready to govern?
Cde President!
We would be watching with keen interest at the deliberations of this congress confident that in you, we have men and women who are committed to make their contribution in making local government work.
We are confident that the resolutions that would emerge from this congress would not only assist in strengthening the South African Municipal Workers Union, but would also give us guidance on what we need to do more to instill our people’s confidence in their ability of local government to deliver on its developmental mandate.
I therefore take this opportunity to wish you well in your deliberations for the next four days and look forward to constructive engagements with your leadership in taking the resolutions of this conference forward.
We believe that the resolutions that you would have adopted here would make our people to confidently say:
My Municipality - My Services
My SALGA - My Collective Voice
My Union - My Partner
My Municipal Worker - My Future
My Community - My Call
I thank you.
