Thousands of jobs begging to be filled
AMID a jobless crisis ripping the country apart, municipalities are struggling to fill positions. And this is despite the fact that civil servants often have better working conditions than employees in the private sector.
It is especially difficult to unearth staff to work in finance and administration: 7 142 are needed, to be exact.
The problem has been blamed, in part, on laws designed to prevent instability in municipalities.
According to Stats SA’s nonfinancial municipal census, there are 41 000 vacancies in South Africa’s 278 municipalities.
To make matters worse, the five-year contracts of most senior municipal managers are set to expire after the local government elections in August, which will mean long delays as efforts are made to fill the posts.
When Stats SA analysed the data, which was produced last year, it found that municipalities had, in fact, managed to reduce the number of vacancies in finance and administration. In 2014, 8 595 of these posts needed to be filled.
Social services, transport and public safety departments are also badly affected.
Municipalities with the highest number of overall vacancies include the Mangaung metropolitan municipality in the Free State, which needed to fill 3 905 posts in 2015, and the City of Cape Town, where there were 2 757 vacancies.
Qondile Khedama, the spokesman for Mangaung, said the city’s administration had been restructured, and as a result there were new divisions — with new positions — in the metro.
“In terms of the job evaluation policy, [the new positions] need to be subjected to the process of job evaluation to determine the salary grade. This process has not yet started, thus contributing to the large number of vacancies,” he said.
Fikile Tshabangu of the South African Local Government Association said the delay in appointing staff was an unintended consequence of laws meant to prevent inappropriate appointments. “It can take anything between four and six months to conclude the recruitment process just for a chief financial officer,” she said. “If that goes well, you are talking about four months to fill a vacancy.”
Economist Kevin Allan, coowner of private company Municipal IQ, which monitors and assesses municipalities, said those with high vacancy rates were unable to perform and struggled to deliver services.
“In an environment of high unemployment . . . and very severe capacity constraints in local government, the fact that there are so many vacant funded positions is a huge problem,” said Allan.
Papikie Mohale, spokesman for the South African Municipal Workers’ Union, said: “Municipalities should be ashamed and embarrassed that, in the midst of the country’s unemployment, municipal vacancy rates are at such levels.
The average civil servant is better off than the privatesector worker
“The youth are worst affected, which is why they are mainly targets of exploitative programmes such as [the] Expanded Public Works Programme.”
Economist Dawie Roodt said the vacancies in finance and administration were indicative of a general skills shortage, which made it difficult for local government to attract people with the necessary skills.
“But it’s not just about filling posts. It’s also just bad political leadership and a matter of plain, simple, bad service. The average civil servant is much better off than the average privatesector worker. This is a leadership issue,” said Roodt.
Jyothi Naidoo of the City of Cape Town said the vacancies in finance were mainly in “lower categories”. They represented only 6.38% of total vacancies.
“For these reasons, as well as the fact that vacancies are filled on a continual basis, it has little impact on the city’s financial stability,” said Naidoo.