Ensuring efficient and capacitated councillors {writer: Staff reporter}

The government seeks to revive its training academy to churn out “efficient” and “capacitated” councillors after the 2011 municipal elections.

“In South Africa, 67% of councillors were new in 2006,” Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Sicelo Shiceka told a briefing before a discussion on the department’s budget vote began in parliament.

“We feel that is not good because you don’t have a situation where you balance experience and new blood.

“We intend to review and strengthen the Local Government Training Academy so that new councillors who come in after the 2011 local government elections are highly capacitated to discharge their responsibilities effectively,” he added.

Shiceka said the department would ensure that in every municipality, the six top positions – municipal manager, chief financial officer, town engineer, town planner, communications manager and human resources manager – were in place.

“We will retrain people after elections, politically and administratively, to ensure that the system is well oiled and can move forward.”

Skills audit

Shiceka said the department was conducting an audit “as we speak”, of the skills and gaps at municipalities.

“On those that we find there are gaps, we want to retrain them – if they are retrainable. If they are not retrainable, they must be able to get out of the system so that people who are capable must come in.”

The date for municipal elections next year would be decided by the end of the year, but should take place within three months of 2 March 2011.

Shiceka, who was responsible for announcing the dates of local government elections, said the inter-ministerial committee was to meet in May to discuss the election next year. “We have not arrived at a time. It will happen towards the end of the year,” he said.

“In terms of the law, the period for the current councillors ends on 2 March 2011.After that, there must be a three-month period in which elections must be held.”

Key legislation

Introducing his budget vote, Shiceka said that a number of key pieces of legislation within the local government sector were under review. Included in the list are the Municipal Systems Act, the Municipal Structures Act, the Demarcation Board Act, and the Municipal Finance Management Act.

“The review is aimed at ensuring that the bottlenecks and blockages to a speedy and quality service delivery are eliminated. The outcome of these reviews will be presented before this House later in the year for processing,” he added.

The minister further announced that he would soon be meeting with the ministers of Finance [Pravin Gordhan] and Energy [Dipuo Peters] to consider what type of revenue streams were sustainable for municipalities.

Financial allocations

Shiceka added that, currently, municipal financial allocations are based on outdated approaches “wherein the baseline used for financing of municipalities is not aligned to their income, revenue base and the tasks at hand.”

He stressed that the ward committee system has to be strengthened to improve implementation.

The Co-operative Governance department would be working with National Treasury to undertake a review of the supply chain management system. The government wanted the system to be “transparent and beyond reproach”.

The department aims to close any loophole that may lead to corrupt practices.

In terms of the Local Government Turnaround Strategy, approved by Cabinet in December, the minister indicated that the South African Local Government Association was expected to adopt the strategy in May.

The new approach to local government involves taking specific municipalities’ own particular needs and circumstances into account when devising turnaround strategies and implementation plans. Therefore, all municipalities are expected to have completed their own specific plans by the end of April 2010.

Municipal budgets for the 2010/11 financial year will be based on the specific turnaround strategies.

In addition, all national and provincial departments and state-owned enterprises are expected “to align their projects and programmes to the specific local government turnaround strategies based on the will of the people”.

Thus far, 232 municipalities out of 283 had completed draft turnaround strategies.

Shiceka declared that R495 billion was required to address municipal basic service backlogs. A special purpose vehicle would be established to meet this need.