The days of overpaid municipal managers pocketing meagre council resources while managing municipalities with no revenue and poor service delivery records appear finally to be over.
The department of provincial and local government this week published guidelines on the competency profile of each municipal manager for all categories of local governments. The guidelines regulate responsibilities, qualifications and skills necessary for each post and the commensurate salary.
The guidelines take effect from next month, with the incoming new local governments, and will be legislated once the restructuring of the public service is over. The government is working on a system to bring local government staff into a single public service with provincial and national staff.
The guidelines come against the repeated exposure of municipalities which pay exorbitant salaries and bonuses to their employees, while most of their work is performed by deployees from national government’s Project Consolidate.
The Mail & Guardian pointed out last year that the salaries of municipal councillors and managers outstrip spending on services by nearly R10-billion, or 10% of the total municipal budget.
Local government experts Kevin Allan and Karen Heese have underscored the correlation between towns with large salary bills and a poor record of capital spending.
A particularly outrageous example was Ntambanana in KwaZulu-Natal, where the council manager pockets R500 000 a year, while the council allocates 20c per citizen for municipal services — compared with a national average of R380.
The Democratic Alliance has pointed out that 93 of the 138 munici-pal managers who run municipalities falling under Project Consolidate were awarded performance bonuses in the past financial year.
The DA’s Wilhelm le Roux cited the example of the municipal manager in North West who received a R377 000 bonus while 73% of residents had no basic sanitation.
Department of Provincial and Local Government Director General Lindiwe Msengana-Ndlela told the M&G the department had developed a framework which defined the required competencies for senior municipal managers.
”Remuneration should be a function of performance in qualitative and quantitative terms,” she said.
She added that the department would cut municipal managers’ salaries if necessary, but would seek corrective action first.
”Where there are retrospective challenges, we must look at that. But this is a forward-looking solution that aims to regulate future appointments. But if a municipal manager doesn’t have a matric, we’ll have to work on a personal development programme. If it doesn’t work out, other corrective action must be taken.”
But Msengana-Ndlela said the salaries of municipal managers would remain competitive, as the government wanted to recruit the best people, even in poor areas where revenue was low.
The guidelines would prevent the hiring of incompetent municipal managers because of their political connections.
Guidelines for smaller municipalities managers include a requirement that they understand municipal law, human resource matters, municipal finances, standards and procedures and hold a degree.
For larger municipalities such as metros, requirements include a comprehensive understanding of the constitutional position of local government and of the city’s global, national and regional context, an understanding of complex financial reports, post-graduate degrees where necessary, and a minimum of seven years of local government experience.
