What do you do when you have a municipality that owes R56-million on its water bill and a company threatening to cut off water to 500 000 people? If you are Matjhabeng executive mayor Mathabo Leeto, you crack your whip, get it paid and avoid political embarrassment and disaster for your constituents.
Matjhabeng municipality comprises Welkom and the towns of Odendaalsrus, Virginia, Hennenman, Allanridge and Ventersburg. When Leeto took over her post in March last year, after the local government elections, the municipality owed a massive amount to Sedibeng Water, which threatened to cut off the region’s supplies.
But, within months of taking office, Leeto had settled the bill. She believes her success lies in accepting responsibility and doing the best she can to deliver. But it has not been an easy road.
”We are living in a patriarchal society,” says Leeto. ”And every time women are given these types of key positions, there will be people who question whether they can perform the tasks.”
Leeto faced a number of challenges when she started out as executive mayor. She says that, aside from the massive water bill that had been carried over since 2004, the municipality’s phone bill was far too high and there was no control over how employees used municipal tele-phones. Another problem was poor revenue collection, which left the municipality struggling to pay its bills.
This posed a huge problem. How does a municipality cope with its running costs if it is short of cash?
Leeto immediately established a revenue and expenditure committee, which began meeting in December last year. Since then, the committee has met every Friday to report to Leeto about money coming into and going out of the municipality. It also identifies weak points in municipal operations and service delivery and creates strategies to address those weaknesses.
Collecting what is owed to the municipality has been crucial to enabling Matjhabeng to operate properly. Leeto says revenue collection is at 85%, which is what was projected for the municipality in its 2005/06 budget. ”But as an individual I am not yet satisfied. There is a lot of money owed to the municipality by the community and we need that money to render services to people.”
The mayor is a tough woman, who expects a lot from officials working under her. A culture of rocking up at work, doing nothing and collecting a salary is not acceptable to her. ”I want to make sure everyone working for the municipality produces results.”
Being a driven and uncompromising boss, and a woman to boot, means that Leeto comes up for criticism. ”Yes, women are treated differently,” she says. ”There are those men who would treat you with respect as a leader and those who think that I am a disrespectful woman, but I need to put my foot down and we expect results. But it doesn’t make me feel small; I accept those realities and continue my work.”
She points out that in her council most of the senior and middle management are male, including the municipal manager and the speaker. ”As a women, you have to go the extra mile to prove yourself,” she says.
Old-fashioned attitudes to women leaders do not deter Leeto in her ambition to clean up her municipality.
”What I told myself is that the difference between a man and a women is just a biological one and if you are given a responsibility as a man or as a women, you must just make sure you do what you are supposed to do,” she says.
Leeto has a number of plans mapped out to tackle service delivery. The municipality’s reliance on old census information means it has very little up-to-date information about residents in Matjhabeng, says Leeto. She is working on an information-gathering project, which she hopes will provide the municipality with a better idea of how many homes it needs to supply with water and electricity and what the service demands on the municipality actually are. A ”mini-census”, as Leeto puts it.
”We need the correct information or we will plan ourselves in circles,” she says.
She is also working to eradicate the infamous ”bucket system” across Matjhabeng by December this year.
Leeto is the deputy chairperson for the ANC in the region and an executive committee member of the provincial legislature. This is over and above becoming a mother, for the second time, to a baby boy. But, she says, the key to managing all these demanding tasks is to ”plan”.
”I always plan — plan my work, plan my day,” she explains. Dividing up tasks according to her various responsibilities and conquering them one at a time is a process that works for her.
Leeto has lived in the area most of her life. She chose a career in politics because she realised that it was one way to contribute to the struggle against apartheid and the oppression of so many South Africans, particularly black women.
Leeto says the key to accomplishing her aims and to her continued success as a woman leader is her grass roots approach. Her advice to all women is, when you are given a responsibility, do your best to deliver on it.
”If you don’t understand something, ask for advice, network with people and do research,” she says, an approach that has worked well for her, it would seem.