Skills shortages, touted as the critical issue hampering the effectiveness of government, are nowhere more obvious than at local government level, role players in the sector told the Mail & Guardian.
Although local government has upped its game in the past few years and significant gains have been made by municipalities, especially the metropolitan councils, local government is still not operating at the expected level.
Various role players agreed that local government has been empowered in the past few years by legislation allowing it to execute its duties with less interference from national government. This includes the Municipal Act, which gives municipalities more independence. There has been a concerted effort from national government to inject more money into municipalities.
The problem with finding the right people to ensure that available means are used effectively remains the greatest hurdle.
Willem Doman, national DA spokesperson for local government, said the problem does not relate only to leadership and management, but also to poor administrative capabilities that are hampering the municipalities’ effectiveness.
‘Someone applying for a business licence will wait six months for a decision to be made,” he said.
The disarray of the municipal accounting systems placed strain on the delivery capabilities of the municipalities because it hampers cash flow.
Success stories of improved collections are mostly in metropolitan councils, such as the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro and Cape Town Metro, which have collection rates of 98% and 100% respectively. The rates are calculated by adding up the amounts due to municipalities on a monthly basis, as well as the collections of debts owed to them.
In Cape Town there have been times when the metro collected more than 100% of its monthly dues because of new systems of collecting debts that had been in arrears for a long time.
In the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro a system has been introduced to allow the debts of those who cannot pay to be written off and services to be delivered without charge to free up debt collectors and accounts departments to deal with the outstanding accounts of those who can pay.
One route of income that has not been used effectively by municipalities is the new legislation on property tax, which compels the municipality to do evaluations of private property and adjust the taxes that owners need to pay.
Four years ago Project Consolidate was introduced to improve delivery at local government level. It was aimed at 139 municipalities identified to be in dire need of a turnaround because their systems had come to a grinding halt because of mismanagement and a lack of qualified and skilled people. This has been now expanded to include all 283 municipalities.
The project has been extended into a five-year plan that will monitor the work of municipalities. The initiative is intended to place capable and experienced staff in struggling municipalities to boost their capacity.
‘We were able to identify the municipalities that needed help and sent targeted support to work there and introduce new systems,” said Luzuko Koti, spokesperson for the department of local and provincial government.
Changing political heads and political turmoil in municipalities have had a profound influence on their effectiveness, role-players said.
In Cape Town the DA’s fight to survive at the helm of the metro council has not helped the council to operate as effectively as it could, local government observers said.
A source within the metro council cited as an example executive mayor Helen Zille being under constant attack from the ANC. ‘[Zille] spends the whole day fighting the smear campaigns and gets to do her work only at night,” said the source.
In the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro the change of the executive mayor has caused upheavals because ‘good plans die a silent death” when the new mayor is not in favour of some proposals, said a metro council official.
Municipalities appoint executive directors for five years to administer change if new political heads are elected but, since the introduction of floor crossing, the politics in local government remains extremely volatile between elections.
A source in Cape Town said problems creep in when executive directors are changed to accommodate ‘cadre deployment”, which puts people in positions where they do not have the necessary skills or experience to do the job.
‘They don’t have sufficient knowledge of the procedures and protocols and that makes it difficult for everyone involved,” he said.
The series of public protests over service delivery shows deepening dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of local government.
Siyabonga Memela, local government specialist at the Institute for a Democratic South Africa, said protests could be avoided if there was better communication between councils and the people on the ground, as well as better communication between different spheres of government.
He said small rural municipalities rely exclusively on conditional grants from government because the communities they serve are too poor to pay for services.
‘They have no existing revenue base. They cannot even collect levies from business because the businesses are mostly taxi drivers and small shops, which struggle to survive.”
An example of the lack of communication is in the delivery of housing; communities often hold their councillor responsible for the slow delivery of housing, even though it is a national competency over which the councillor has little influence.
Local councillors, however, are the only link people have with government, Memela said, and therefore they have to demonstrate the political will to change things and have a sense of urgency when it comes to addressing the people’s complaints.