Governance failures in municipalities must be stopped, says Ramaphosa

Municipalities are facing a credibility crisis, and the country cannot allow the widespread governance failures in local government to continue, President Cyril Ramaphosa says.

Local government, which is at the coalface of service delivery, is for the most part in a dire state. This is seen clearly in the continued regression in audit outcomes of municipalities, which point to weak financial management and a lack of accountability.

The late auditor-general Kimi Makwetu emphasised the deteriorating municipal finances in successive years, but officials and local government politicians still objected to turning the situation around.

There has been a stronger focus on local councils from a national perspective, including the development of a district development model, which would remove the silos between national, provincial and local spheres of government.

Addressing the SA Local Government Association (Salga) on Thursday morning, almost exactly 20 years since the first democratic-era municipal elections in 2000, Ramaphosa said municipalities still faced a range of serious challenges.

These challenges are expected to remain in focus in the coming year when South Africans go to the polls in the local government elections. Ramaphosa said that while many problems that municipalities now face were inherited, SA has a situation where many municipalities are ill-equipped to take on the responsibilities expected of them ”.

He said some municipalities had acquitted themselves reasonably or even very well ”, and that basic services were more widely available than before.

However, there were others that could not adequately perform even their basic functions, let alone carry out their developmental role, he said.

Coupled with institutional weaknesses like corruption and nepotism, many of our municipalities are facing a crisis of credibility,” Ramaphosa said.

We cannot allow the widespread governance failures in municipalities to continue. We cannot have municipalities that are so dysfunctional that people feel they must resort to violence to be heard,” he said.

Protests often occur in SA as communities take to the streets to complain about service problems.

Ramaphosa said SA could not afford to allow local government to fail. He said the country s

’ experience with the Covid-19 pandemic, in which all spheres of government had to be on the same page, demonstrated the importance of political leadership in forging collaborative public service networks.

Capacity constraints at municipalities had to be addressed, he said, while it was also urgent to attend to the maintenance of municipal infrastructure.

“The speed and responsiveness of national government to Covid-19 shows that this certainly can be done where necessary,” Ramaphosa said.

WE CANNOT HAVE MUNICIPALITIES SO DYSFUNCTIONAL THAT PEOPLE FEEL THEY MUST RESORT TO VIOLENCE TO BE HEARD