Deepening accountability, accelerating service delivery and management development. You are important
I am grateful for this opportunity to address the senior managers of the municipalities of our country. Each of you present here today serves the people of this country in a very immediate way, often on a daily basis, often in difficult circumstances. Individually and collectively, you have been entrusted with the authority to change people’s lives for the better. But with public authority comes a corresponding public duty, a duty to answer for how you have used the powers entrusted to you.
These are serious public responsibilities in any country. In a country like ours, however, confronted with such extreme levels of poverty and inequality, they can be the difference between a better life or lifelong hardship and suffering for millions of our fellow citizens. They lie at the heart of the topic you have chosen for your conference: Deepening accountability, accelerating service delivery and management development.
It is an apt subject in today’s context, and I would like to commend Institute of Local Government Managers (ILGM) for choosing it. It demonstrates your willingness and commitment as management professionals to engage in serious self-reflection at a time when there is great anxiety about local government in the country, and a pressing need to do things differently throughout the state.
Let me take this opportunity to extend Minister Shiceka’s best wishes to the convention. The Minister believes strongly, as I do, that ILGM and its related professional bodies have a pivotal role to play to build effective and accountable local government in our country.
By investing in developing the skills and competence of our municipal managers you are helping to build a system of local government that can act effectively improve people’s lives. Through the pledge you have taken as members of ILGM, to uphold the highest values of excellence, professionalism and accountability in your working lives, you are declaring your intention to use your professional skills in ways that deepen the rights of citizens, improve their material conditions and enhance the quality of local democracy.
State of local government report
We shaped a developmental local government model to reflect our aspirations for inclusive citizenship, our desires to release millions of our fellow citizens from grinding poverty and neglect, our hope that communities would be active participants in the government of local affairs, and our awareness that to prosper as a country we needed to connect the needs of communities to the goals of national reconstruction and development.
We have achieved much since those formative years
The creation of wall to wall municipalities has extended democracy and the rights of citizenship into every part of the country. Communities forced apart to serve the jaundiced vision of racial separation are now united under common government, equal citizenship and a single tax base. People are no longer foreigners in their own country but holders of constitutional rights, including the right to elect their local representatives and call them to account.
We have gone a significant way towards the promise of developmental local government, but we are clear that we are facing severe problems and complex challenges. The ministry recently undertook a national assessment of all municipalities to determine the extent of the problems we face. The state of local government in South Africa report presents the findings of this country-wide assessment of the current state of local government. It is a product of empirical research and several months of in-depth engagement with municipalities, national and provincial departments and key stakeholder groups.
The report was discussed at the special meeting between the President and municipal mayors and managers in Khayelitsha on 20 October and at a two day National Indaba on local government following this, which brought together over 1 100 senior government officials from all three spheres, traditional leaders, and representatives from labour, business, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), academic, and other sectors of civil society. The report provides, we believe, a balanced assessment of the strengths and weakness in local government, but, of course, it highlights many problems.
Some of these problems are structural and caused by social and economic forces outside the control of municipalities. Our large cities, for example, which are amongst our better performing municipalities, are struggling to manage the consequences of urbanisation, which has resulted in the growth of large informal settlements in and around major urban centres. Urbanisation is putting enormous strain on our infrastructure and service delivery even as it traps people in inhuman living conditions.
It is noticeable that many of the protests we are seeing today are taking place in our economically stronger municipalities. Many of our municipalities in former homelands and rural areas are deeply impoverished places, where people are mostly too poor to pay for services, and local government is generally struggling and often dysfunctional. In many of these areas, no local government had ever existed before, and thus took a long time just to get established.
Other problems are the result of failures by the other two spheres. For example: some policies are over ambitious relative to the actual capacity of municipalities.
In other words, unwittingly, we may have created expectations that local government cannot fulfil, or placed a burden on municipalities that perhaps only the strongest amongst them can carry. We have also failed to devise a sustainable long term strategy for supporting municipalities that are inherently different and confronting unique problems linked to their location in a distorted spatial economy. But many of our problems are the result of failures by municipalities themselves.
The declaration adopted by the indaba acknowledged progress and innovation in local government. It also confirmed that the problems are severe, that we must therefore do things differently, and that we can combat even the severest of problems through a collective national effort. This collective effort is what government means when we say: “local government is everybody’s business”. The report lays the basis for a turnaround strategy for local government, which is presently being developed.
Turnaround is not about blaming local government. Making local government everyone’s business and striving together to do things differently means we must rebuild the public’s confidence in local government. We must work together to ensure that local government serves the people of this country. We must acknowledge, as the President said, in his address to municipal mayors on 20 October that: “Citizens also blame municipalities for functions that they have no direct control over. For example: municipalities are blamed for dysfunctional schools, poor service at hospitals and the slow pace of building houses. These are, of course, responsibilities of other spheres of government. But for our people, local government is the first door of government they know, and sometimes the only door that they can reach”.
Because local government is the first door of government citizens can reach, doing things differently means we must also ask whether current institutional arrangements help municipalities to keep that door open to citizens. Whether some of our policy frameworks and systems are not perhaps too ambitious or burdensome? For instance, surely, we need a more realistic approach, a differentiated model, to local government rather than the “one size fits all” model we have at present?
We must also ask national government and provinces to improve the quality of our regulation, oversight and support of local government. Above all, we must place the citizen, poor and vulnerable citizens in particular, at the centre of everything we do. As the first door, local government must work in ways that reconnect citizens to the state so that we overcome the distance and estrangement that has crept into the relationship between state and citizen that is evident in many of these public protests.
Being accountable
Citizens of our country expect clean, effective and accountable government in every municipality in our country, big or small. These are the values of public service we elevated into our Constitution and built into the policy framework for local government. In his 2009 state of the nation, President Zuma committed all public officials at every level of government to put the values of service and accountability to the people of our country at the centre of everything we do.
The President made this call again when he met with local officials in Cape Town last month. That same commitment is the foundation of ILGM’s constitution and the basis for the pledge you have taken as members of this institution. Indeed, this common commitment is what should unite all of us in public service and what distinguishes public service from private enterprise. So, as we gather here today, wherever in the state we may find ourselves serving the people of this country, let us agree on this one thing, developmental local government cannot work without skilled, capable and ethical people serving the citizens of this country to the best of their abilities.
That is what citizens expect from their elected local leaders. That is what citizens expect from the managers and staff that administer local services. When both kinds of leaders rise to those expectations, when they work together as public servants who may perform different tasks but are always united by a common will to serve the people of this country, that is when accountable government becomes a living reality for citizens.
So these values are not strange or foreign concepts to any of us present here, but the defining features of the vision for developmental local government in the municipal legislation that parliament has enacted. Among other issues, the legislation provides a wide range of transparency measures, such as annual and in-year reports, report back to communities and audit documents. This is to ensure that those with authority actually provide full disclosure of all information that is essential to empower citizens and independent bodies to call them to answer for their actions.
This serves to give practical expression to the values of clean, responsive and accountable local government that lie at the heart of our vision of developmental local government. Accountability, in other words, is constituted by the basic set of institutions that define the scope, limits and consequences attaching to the exercise of public authority within municipality.
Accountability in short can be defined as:
“The relationship between an actor and a forum, in which the actor has an obligation to explain and justify his or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgment, and the actor can be sanctioned” (Bovens: 2005).
Its function, according to the study from which this definition is quoted, “is to force power to speak the truth”. The state of local government in South Africa report shows that there are serious weaknesses in our system of public accountability. In some municipalities, accountability and the rule of law are in a state of near collapse due to corruption, patronage, and factionalism. In these cases, the rules of accountability don’t apply: they are superseded by informal rules that promote patronage and personal loyalty, not service and accountability to the citizen. In these places, you end up with the wrong people in municipal office, the wrong culture taking root, and little hope for professionally run administration. We must uproot corruption.
Relationship between councillors and politicians
Uncertainty in the roles of the various municipal organs is common and widespread, in particular between politicians and managers. In some cases, the cause of the problem is that there is no proper delegation of roles between for example the mayor, Speaker, chief whip, and municipal manager, which results in overlapping or confused responsibilities, and often conflict. It appears that in far too many cases the problem is caused by political interference in the appointment or suspension of municipal managers. For example: there are cases of municipalities in which municipal managers or other managers below the level of municipal manager are politically senior to the mayor! Effective management, leadership and oversight are not possible under these circumstances.
There are clearly problems at the political administrative interface, and they are showing in the consistently high number of vacancies in management, suspensions of managers, and acting appointments. A National Treasury presentation to Parliament in 2008 showed that the number of vacancies in municipal manager and chief financial officer positions increased dramatically in the six months immediately after the last municipal elections. By December 2006, the vacancy rate for both positions stood at around 20 percent.
The suspension of several municipal managers shows clearly that if municipal managers are to perform their statutory functions as professionals, additional measures are needed to insulate them from suspension for frivolous reasons or improper motives, and to equip them with the skills to be able to do their jobs professionally in a pressurised political milieu. When local government policy was being developed, we thought that appointing senior managers under contract would be in the best interests of transformation. But with the benefit of learned experience perhaps it is time to revisit some aspects of current arrangements:
* How can we ensure that senior managers appointed on contracts are not vulnerable to being dismissed for political and other reasons that have nothing to do with their performance?
* Should an external authority, such as the MEC and the minister, have some say in the appointment and suspension of managers to ensure that these decisions are shielded from inappropriate considerations and procedurally correct?
* What steps must political parties take to ensure that political appointments do not undermine the effectiveness and accountability of local government? Should there, for example, be a prohibition on the appointment of administrators who are senior political party office bearers?
* Do we need an independent body to evaluate the performance of senior managers to guide councillors on decisions about managers and also provide a measure of protection for managers against arbitrary decisions about them?
The government is very concerned about the high turnover of senior municipal managers and the spiralling trend in the suspension of managers. Often senior managers are suspended for long periods on pay, and municipalities are very tardy in processing allegations against senior managers. Proper procedures are not followed. Most municipalities do not have clear policies on how to manage suspensions and dismissals of senior managers. Many cases end up in court needlessly, with huge financial consequences for municipalities.
Sometimes managers receive unjustified huge pay-outs. All of this is quite wrong. And, as national government, we are fed up! So too, indeed, is the public! As part of an attempt to address these problems, our department will within the next 10 days or so gazette for public comment draft regulations on a disciplinary code and procedures for senior municipal managers. We are very keen that you comment on these draft regulations. Please do so!
We also intend to amend the Municipal Systems Act to allow the Minister to regulate the performance of municipal managers and managers directly accountable to the municipal managers. Both these initiatives are part of the process of strengthening the local government turnaround strategy. There is clearly a need to review the relationship between political party structures and municipal structures. From the mid-90s until the Polokwane conference the state structures increasingly took over the responsibilities of the party. That was wrong! But we must also guard against the opposite extreme: the party assuming the responsibilities of the state.
Of course, the party must provide the framework for restructuring the state and for the policies of government. But the party should not substitute for the state, any more than the state should substitute for the party. At municipal level, there is emerging a mutually destructive relationship between the ANC regional executive committees (and, to a lesser extent Branch Executive Committees) and municipal structures. Power struggles within the party are translated to municipalities and serve to undermine good governance and service delivery in municipalities. But, also, power struggles within municipalities get transferred to party structures and serve to weaken the party. There is a need to develop a relationship between party structures and municipalities that recognise both the inter-relatedness and distinctiveness of these respective structures and that serves to ensure a mutually reinforcing relationship that strengthens these respective structures.
The party decides on the election manifesto and other policies. It also chooses the candidates for election to councils. The party must, of course, provide political and strategic oversight over the councillors. Obviously, councillors must be accountable to their political parties. And given the tendency of some councillors to be lax or errant, it’s important that the party monitors councillors. But it’s not for the party structures to micro-manage councillors, especially as this has sometimes less to do with ensuring that councillors perform effectively and more to do with influencing tenders and narrowly interfering in appointment of staff.
Why should party structures nominate councillors to serve in municipalities if they do not have confidence in them? If a councillor undermines the principles, values or policies of a party, or fails to perform, or is in other ways errant, the party should recall the councillor. Municipal structures should not be treated almost like sub-committees of party structures. Of course, what I am saying here is somewhat condensed and crude. But I think we need to debate this matter of the relationship between the party and municipal structures and more broadly the state.
Contribute to the turnaround strategy
There is no doubt that municipal managers and professional associations must play a key part in building public confidence, capability and accountability in the municipal system. Managers provide the technical and professional skills to translate council policy into concrete actions. There is also no doubt that achieving clean, responsive and accountable local governance must be one of the foundations of government’s turnaround strategy when it is introduced next year. For these reasons, municipal managers, individually and through professional bodies such as ILGM, must contribute to the design of that strategy and own its implementation. We want every manager to join government and our social partners on this journey to reclaim the promise of local democracy in our communities.
Without your skills and commitment to improving the quality and effectiveness of local administration many citizens of this country will not escape the scourge of poverty and the social ills that flow from it. Your own electronic journal is proof that despite the problems we are facing there is real commitment and innovation in municipalities. There is an article about a visit by officials from a local municipality to one of our metros. It quotes a statement by an official from that metro that for me typifies what it means to live the values we are talking about here:
“Whenever we develop a business plan, we ask ourselves, how does it help in the proactive absorption of the poor? We must put it in black and white that we're building a city that is responsive to the needs of the people. [This] should be a city that provided opportunities for everyone. We don't want people to stay poor forever”.
ILGM and other professional bodies are a platform to nurture the values articulated by this official and reproduce them throughout the system. We must look for innovative ways to induce and reward officials that embody this spirit of service, recruit them into our municipalities, and retain them in service. This turnaround strategy is about doing things differently, not about laying blame for what is not working. We must all see municipal management as a true profession that enjoys high status and respect in society.
We must invest in the negotiating and other softer skills that will equip our municipal managers to navigate the complex political terrain they work in daily. And as managers you must give your very best efforts to the people of this country. In return government must give you full support. The turnaround strategy will be taken to Cabinet in early December. It must be understood that it is a national framework turnaround strategy. It will then be taken to municipalities between January and March next year. Each municipality will develop its own municipal specific turnaround plan within the context of the national framework strategy, following the fullest consultation of all the key stakeholders in a municipality.
The provinces will assist municipalities to develop their specific turnaround plans. Committees at national, provincial and municipal levels will be established, comprising the widest range of stakeholders, to monitor progress on the implementation of the turnaround strategy and plans.
In closing, I want to wish you every success in your deliberations at your convention, but also to leave you with a challenge, in the form of three questions that you are in the best position to answer and whose answers will enrich government’s turnaround strategy. The questions are:
* What are the two most important areas of municipal administration where we need to do things differently to improve effectiveness and accountability? And in particular what must managers do differently?
* How can we better use the collective expertise of professional associations such as ILGM to build our capacity for effective and accountable local government?
* What are the two or three most important things that national government and provinces can do differently that will make your work as managers easier and more effective?
Thank you for your time, thank you for listening to me.
Thank you.
Issued by: Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs
18 November 2009
Source: Institute of Local Government Managers Annual conference (http://www.dplg.gov.za/)
