What are the magic ingredients that make some municipalities successful? This question has been asked often, in light of recent community uprisings against poor service delivery.
As is the case with most challenges, the answer, or at least part of it, is in trimming away at ideology, philosophy and other complications that dog service delivery. Doing the right thing, at the right time, in a sustainable, efficient and effective manner should become the hallmark of South African local governments in the future.
The White Paper on Local Government espouses developmental local government as the recipe for successful local authorities. It defines it as “local government committed to working with citizens and groups within the community to find sustainable ways to meet their social, economic and material needs and improve the quality of their lives”. To achieve this stated aim, I suggest that municipalities do the following:
Get the basics right
Start by ensuring that people have access to adequate basic services such as water, sanitation, refuse removal and electricity. Our administrative systems, including billing systems, registries, human resource development systems and performance management systems should inspire confidence in the ability of the municipality to serve its community.
Emphasise economic development
Sustainability is a word that is used often when discussing the challenges confronting local government. To achieve sustainability in service delivery, consumers must pay for those services. We must bring people into the mainstream of economic activity to decrease their reliance on social welfare grants and allow them to earn a decent living. Developing and implementing realistic economic development strategies will assist in achieving this goal. All municipalities cannot be the gateway to Africa, and each will have to determine its own competitive advantages and build its economic strategy around these.
Involve communities in governance
The challenge is to move beyond the vocal or well-resourced members of society. Interaction with organised business, political organisations and civic groups, among others, is important, but this should not be the extent of community participation. To make participative democracy real, we have to strengthen institutional measures such as ward committees and integrated development plan (IDP) representation forums. We must also allow ordinary people to have input into how they are governed and how resources are allocated.
Develop the skills and capacity of municipal officials
Ensuring that skills development is aligned with the IDP of the municipality and province, as well as national socio-economic policy, will help to build the skills necessary for municipalities to deliver. This must happen throughout the municipality, and not only be confined to those in management. All municipal employees must understand their role in realising the objectives of the IDP, and must be empowered through the development of their skills to make a contribution to excellent service delivery.
Share resources
Local government functions under the economic reality of increasing needs and limited resources. More efficient use must therefore be made of the available resources in order to obtain maximum impact. One of the ways of ensuring this is through implementing a shared service model for local
government. The information and computer technology (ICT) sector is one where a shared service model can be effectively employed to free up resources for service delivery. The available technology makes providing a centralised ICT service to all municipalities not only possible, but also relatively affordable. Besides the obvious advantages of creating economies of scale by providing a shared ICT service it will also assist other spheres of government that have an oversight function over local government. Analysis of the financial situation of municipalities will be whole lot easier if one system is used and a common set of indicators developed.
Make Batho Pele a reality in municipalities
Municipalities exist only to serve communities and individuals. Batho Pele, or putting people first, and its eight principles must therefore be realised. The eight principles are regular consultation, setting of service standards, increasing access to services, ensuring higher levels of courtesy, providing more and better information, increasing openness and transparency, remedying failures and mistakes and giving the best possible value for money.
Doreen Atkinson wrote in 2002 that the characteristics of modern local government should include the following:
- must be customer-oriented;
- has a strong emphasis on performance;
- measures its performance;
- works in partnerships;
- allocates and uses funds on the basis of measurable results;
- ties all resource systems to rewarding results; and
- provides for continuous evaluation of results through performance audits and uses results as a basis for continuous quality improvement.
If all of the above is implemented we will have responsive, caring and capacitated municipalities, able to deliver services to their constituents in a sustainable manner. This is clearly what we should be striving for.
Louis Scheepers is the municipal manager of Saldanha Bay Municipality. He is also chairperson of the Western Cape region of the Institute for Local Government Management and serves on its national executive council