Programme Director
MECs from various provinces
Chairperson of SALGA and the SALGA delegation
Chairperson of the portfolio committee
Members of the Houses of Traditional leadership
Executive Mayors and Mayors
Union representatives
Colleagues from the academia
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen
Three years since cabinet adopted the Local Government Turnaround Strategy, we have converged here to take stock of the road traversed so far and to map the way forward on how we can accelerate implementation of the strategy.
This we believe would also help in improving performance in local governance and thus restore our people’s confidence in local government.
We have called all of you today to come and share with us your views on how best we can respond to the on-going challenges facing local government out of our conviction that working together, we can do more.
Local government is a key part of the reconstruction and development effort of our country. An assessment done by the department, which predated the adoption of the Turnaround Strategy, found that 115 local municipalities and 23 district municipalities are either highly or very highly vulnerable.
These municipalities are mainly located in areas of high poverty concentration (socio-economic vulnerability) with significant services backlogs (institutional vulnerability).
A strong correlation therefore exists between socio-economic vulnerability and institutional vulnerability with institutional vulnerability most pronounced in rural municipalities and those localities that have only one or two small towns.
The Turn Around Strategy was thus adopted aimed at counteracting the root causes of some of the persistent problems facing local government, especially those municipalities that have evidence of performance failures and adverse socio-economic circumstances.
In this regard, five strategic objectives were identified to guide the Local Government Turnaround Strategy (LGTAS) interventions and support framework:
1) Ensure that municipalities meet the basic service needs of communities
2) Build clean, effective, efficient, responsive and accountable local government
3) Improve performance and professionalism in municipalities
4) Improve national and provincial policy, oversight and support, and
5) Strengthen partnerships between local government, communities and civil society.
Institutional mechanisms were set-up both at a National and Provincial level to provide support to Municipalities in the implementation of the Turn Around Strategy.
I should hasten to indicate, programme director that the adoption and implementation of the Local Government Turn Around Strategy also harvested lessons learned from project consolidate and used project consolidate as its building block.
Over the past 18 months, South Africa has witnessed a spate of local protests with issues of service delivery at the heart of these protests. The spate of local protests increased after the local government elections of 2011 with 2012 experiencing the highest number of local protests thus far.
We have also seen the findings of the Auditor General with regards to the state of local government from the audit report of 2010/11.
Both the local protests and the findings of the Auditor General are of major concern to me and to government, hence we called on you today to come and share with us your views on how we could turn the tide.
Let me also use this opportunity to share with you some of our findings as we continue with our work of providing support to municipalities to carry out their Constitutional mandate to the people of this country.
On accelerating service delivery we have found that:
- There is lack of financial resources to address service delivery backlogs.
- Provisioning of water is impacted upon amongst others by the capacity of water treatment plants, inadequacy of water infrastructure and bulk services; lack of maintenance and upgrading of old infrastructure.
- We are still haunted by existence of PIT toilets and bucket system in some cases. There is also an urgent need to upgrade waste water treatment works in a number of municipalities.
- Our electricity grid is inadequate to provide electricity for our growing population and settlements. We continue to be dogged by backlogs and inadequate bulk infrastructure particularly for new developments.
- Most of our Municipalities still have to develop a roads master plan inclusive of operations and maintenance of roads.
- There is a growing need for informal settlement upgrading where there are informal settlements and need to provide housing to address informal settlement areas.
- Our Municipalities are ill-equipped to respond to disaster due to budget constraints and limited Fire Fighting Services Equipment.
- As if this is not enough, there is a shortage of planners and engineers leading to poor capital expenditure and planning impacting negatively on service delivery.
On enhancing Good Governance, we have found that:
- There is lack of planning and reporting between some local municipalities and their district municipalities.
- We have also established that not all districts are playing a support role towards their local municipalities.
- There is also a lack of participation of sector departments in the development and implementation of the Integrated Development Plan (IDP).
- In most instances, Section 139 interventions that occurred have not necessarily provided assistance to restore stability in municipalities.
- Municipalities also have capacity challenges due to critical vacant positions of section 56 managers. In one Municipality for instance, a post has been vacant for six years now.
- Performance Management System only implemented at section 56 level in certain municipalities. Even in this instance, the implementation is not sufficient enough to enhance the capacity of the municipality to deliver.
- There is inadequate public participation processes leading to communication and information gap between municipalities and the residents.
- The roles and responsibilities of Community Development Workers (CDW’s) and ward committees need to be developed and better clarified.
On enhancing sound financial management, we have found that:
- Municipalities have a low revenue base due to their inability to collect sufficient revenue which impacts on the their cash flow situation;
- The debtor’s book of most municipalities is forever increasing thus requiring drastic interventions particularly with regard to debt owed by government to municipalities but also in instances where communities don’t pay for water and refuse removal and electricity is provided by Eskom.
- Audit Committees are not fully functional and internal audit units not fully capacitated to ensure that audit action plans are implemented. These are factors that contribute to the negative audit outcomes of municipalities.
- Lack of funds to develop / review the valuation roll in some municipalities.
- Lack of implementation of credit and debt control policies by municipalities.
- The Fiscal Framework and the Equitable Share allocations to municipalities need to be reviewed as some municipalities are not financially viable as they are unable to fund services from their financial resources and cannot address service delivery backlogs.
- Poor revenue collection due to lack of payment by communities for water & refuse services and incorrect billings on water services and electricity losses.
- Lack of internal controls especially as it relates to adherence to supply chain management processes resulting in poor accountability.
- Lack of implementation of audit action plans.
On rolling out Infrastructure Development, we found that:
- Support is required by certain municipalities with regard to contract management during planning and implementation of Municipal Infrastructure Grant (MIG) projects.
- There is inadequate MIG funding to address service delivery backlogs.
- There is generally a lack of maintenance plans and policies for infrastructure projects.
- There are serious delays experienced with approval processes for Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA’s) thus impacting on MIG spending.
- Some municipalities are unable to spend on MIG due to the lack of human resource capacity and poor capital expenditure planning as well as due to high pricing of bidders due to location of the municipalities and SMME’s failure to complete projects.
On Fighting Corruption, we have found that
- The general tendency by LGTAS municipalities was to avoid reporting on corruption
- However, poorly managed procurement processes were raised as a contributing factor.
Programme Director!
Beyond our own findings, the Auditor General has made the following general findings with regards to the state of our Municipalities.
The most prevalent finding on non-compliance with laws and regulations was the lack of adoption and implementation of a performance management system at 37% of auditees.
There were no mid‐year budget and performance assessments at 30% of auditees and 20% of auditees did not report in their annual performance report on performance against predetermined objectives, indicators and targets.
Thirty per cent of municipalities did not disclose in the annual performance report the measures taken to improve performance.
Of great concern is that a performance audit committee was not in place at 27% of auditees and at 20% their performance audit committee did not function in the manner prescribed in legislation.
Further to this, internal audit at 37% of auditees did not audit performance measures. 93% of auditees had findings on material non‐compliance with laws and regulations.
Conclusion
We have invited all of you here today from Municipalities to Trade Unions to Academia to share with you our experiences with regards to the challenges facing local government.
We are hopeful that when we move out of this hotel today, we would not have only succeeded to share with you our challenges, but would equally emerge out of here more wiser on how best we could confront those challenges so that our people could be able to confidently say…
My CoGTA - My Intergovernmental Facilitator
My Traditional Leadership - My Pride
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.
