Delivery to remain major challenge

Accelerating service delivery to cover backlogs and meet the needs of a growing local population and thousands of immigrants, involving all the major stakeholders in the municipal processes and facilitating a transparent and more accountable local government will, in most municipalities throughout the country, be the greatest immediate challenges facing whichever party wins the local election in 2011.

That is according to Dr Sunette Steyn, programme manager of collaborative governance and partnerships at the Institute for Corporate Citizenship of Unisa.

During the past seven years, there has been a dramatic acceleration of local government protests in South Africa.

According to information available, 27% of the protests since 2004 have taken place in Gauteng, 14% in North West, 12% in both Western Cape and Mpumalanga, 11% in Free State, 10% in Eastern Cape, 7% in KwaZulu-Natal, 4% in Limpopo and 3% in Northern Cape. Some 45% of the protests have taken place in the metros. 34% have been in informal settlements.

The local government turnaround strategy is a very ambitious high-level government-wide effort to stabilise local government and put municipalities back on a path of responsive and accountable service delivery.

It abandons the one size fits all approach that has predominated government thinking for 15 years. To date, a total of 232 municipalities out of 283 (82%) have completed their draft municipal-specific turnaround strategies, says Dr Steyn.

The five strategic objectives of this strategy involve ensuring that municipalities meet the basic service needs of communities, building clean, effective, responsive and accountable local government, improving performance and professionalism in municipalities, improving national and provincial policy, oversight and support, and strengthening partnerships between local government and communities.

“I don’t know how many of the operational objectives following from the strategic objectives have been implemented so far,” said Steyn.

“The well-publicised interparty and intraparty conflicts must have occupied a substantial amount of time and energy of ‘civil servants’ during the past six months, to such an extent, I suspect, that little time and energy was left for getting down to the real business of service delivery,” she added.

Pressing basic delivery issues

The minister of cooperative governance and t raditional affairs, Sicelo Shiceka is facing significantly high demands at local government level.

In 2007 for example more than half the residents in some municipalities did not have access to piped water and sanitation.

In the OR Tambo district municipality (Eastern Cape) and the Sisonke district municipality (KwaZulu-Natal) 64.4% and 52.7% of residents respectively did not have access to piped water.

In the OR Tambo district municipality and the Umkhanyakude district municipality (KwaZulu-Natal) 41.2% and 33.3% of residents respectively had no toilet facility or were still using the bucket system.

Also in 2007, South Africa had an unemployment rate of 22.4%. In the same year, the unemployment rate in some municipalities was as high as 66.1% and 33.3% in the Metsweding district municipality (Gauteng) and the Motheo district municipality (Free State) respectively.

Experience has also shown that despite impressive national figures for the delivery of expanded services, municipalities are battling to deliver quality services, mainly as a result of a lack of skills and cadre deployment. This has led to protests in several areas of the country, Dr Steyn added.

Cadre deployment

Appointments and promotions based on affirmative action have been a prominent factor. Anita Botha, director of Pro-Active Management Services, says there is a direct causal relationship between affirmative action and poor service delivery).

“Affiliation and nepotism rather than skills and merit result in turning municipalities into poor to mediocre institutions and political playing fields where the capacity, passion and commitment to serve the community is totally absent,” she warned.

A lack of performance management and monitoring combined with unwillingness or inability to maintain discipline led to many ‘well-connected’ employees becoming a law unto themselves.

Prof André Duvenhage, professor and research director for social transformation at North West University,said there should be a clear, clinical differentiation between the administrative managerial content and the political content, but if you mix these two, you “get a high level of nepotism and corruption”.

“The government is currently under pressure, because of its broad church of ideological interests that are merged together, to reward so-called loyalists, hence the policy of cadre deployment.”

Transformation of administrative and financial systems

The department of cooperative government and traditional affairs will be working with national treasury this year to review the supply-chain management system so as to ensure that the system is transparent and beyond reproach and that government is able to close any loophole for corrupt practices that might be perpetuated at that level.

According to Dr Douglas Boateng of Unisa’s School of Business Leadership, technological platforms as such are not the solution to improving supply-chain management.

Rather, the implementation of a coherent supply-chain strategy, supported by a technological solution, is pivotal in improving the system and service delivery as a result.

This is considered a long-term answer to effective service delivery Initiatives and potential achievement of more value for every rand spent.
"However, there has to be a strategic supply-chain blueprint which incorporates a clearly defined modus operandi for procurement and the leveraging of government spend for optimal cost efficiency.

“If this is not done, the efforts of national treasury to leverage spend and increase accountability via a technology platform will remain a pipe-dream”, says Boateng.

Filling six critical senior municipal posts

The government has set out a target of filling critical senior municipal posts as soon as possible in all of the 283 local governments, but according to Dr Steyn it is highly unlikely that this target will be met.

Take for example the requirement of a town engineer. In all, 33 of South Africa’s municipalities currently do not have a single qualified engineer on its staff and it is most unlikely that this situation will change for the better in the near future given the absence of qualified municipal engineers in the country.

In September 2009 The Star reported that by 2005 the total number of civil engineering staff in local government was down to 1 534, a drop of over 1 000 from the late 1980s.  David Botha and  Allyson Lawless of the South African Institute of Civil Engineering said that by mid-2007 the figure was worse. ‘Today there are fewer than three civil engineering staff per 100 000, down from 21-plus in the previous dispensation, they said.

As for senior management, the State of Local Government in South Africa: Overview Report produced by the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs in October 2009 stated that there was an overall vacancy rate of 12% for senior managers in local government in 2009.

The department also noted that the competency levels for critical (middle and senior management) positions were not regulated.

For instance, a municipal assessment indicated that a former tea lady had become the chief financial officer (CFO) in a municipality.

In Limpopo, according to the Overview Report, there was one local municipality where all middle and senior manager posts were vacant except for the Chief Financial Officer and the director of community services.

The report stated that many municipalities had no experienced senior managers and weak financial management. Only in Gauteng were all municipal CFO posts filled.

The Municipal Demarcation Board's 2007/08 national capacity assessment report found that South Africa's municipalities were performing less than 50% of the functions they were meant to carry out.

A study by the South African Local Government Association (Salga) found in August 2007 that one in three municipal councillors could not read or write, and that even more lacked the basic competencies to run local government finances.

Even though a dearth of skills exists at a municipal level, the Local Government Budgets and Expenditure Review 2003 to 2009 showed that 28% of municipal employees are appointed to posts that are not reflected on the municipality's organisational structure.

Rather these are political deployments made at the expense of hiring qualified individuals, while vacancy rates for key posts continue to remain high.

In July 2009 City Press reported that the collapse of municipalities in the North West could be traced to the appointment of loyalists of the African National Congress  to top provincial and municipal positions during the 1990s.

This practice continued when the new ANC leadership under Supra Mahumapelo took over in 2005. He appointed loyalists to top positions in the party, legislature and municipalities.

This resulted in a loss of skills, especially in municipalities that were ‘centres of excellent service delivery' such as Mafikeng. This practice resulted in decreasing standards of service delivery, and rendered North West municipalities dysfunctional.

Technological platforms must be combined with expertise, strategic insight and planning if government is to achieve reasonable efficiency and put its spend to work better for the citizens.

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