‘Dunderheads’ in office

RUN BY PEOPLE WITHOUT QUALIFICATIONS, SAYS ANALYST

The dearth of qualifications of officials at local government level is to blame for the poor performance by municipalities in rendering services in post-apartheid South Africa, a local government analyst says.

Johannesburg-based independent analyst Fikile Bili said the ANC government made the biggest mistake since 1994 when it deployed people without qualifications and capacity to run the municipalities.

He warned the ruling party that there was no government in the world that would succeed without efficient local government structures.

“For as long as you want to deploy people in local government without capacity, experience and qualification, you will never render good quality services to the people,” Bili said.

As service delivery was the only political mandate that had to be delivered by local government, people have to be happy about the services rendered to them.

“The municipalities are at the coal face of the people and residents have to be proud of them,” he said.

Bili’s statement came just a few months after auditor-general Kimi Makwetu reported that many municipalities in the country continued to struggling to make ends meet in their audit performances.

The AG revealed that 14 municipalities had stopped producing clean audits. The report showed that 15% of municipalities were improving, 13% regressing and 67% did not change at all.

According to Bili, many municipalities employed political activists without qualifications because they were their local political bosses.

“People with no credibility and capacity to serve are deployed to pursue political mandates of wrong leaders, rather than push service delivery to communities.” He said uneducated mayors and semi-illiterate municipal managers with no relevant work experience were often hired.

“The type of mayors we have in local government don’t even have matric. They don’t have a vision on how to grow the town and the municipality as a whole,” Bili said.

He said the fact that in one municipality a former cleaner was presently a mayor was an indictment on cadre deployment by political principals.

“That is honestly undermining the vision of Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo. To allow dunderheads to lead academics in a municipality is mind-boggling indeed,” he said.

Bili alleged that at Ditsobotla local municipality in North West, a worker with only a wine-tasting certificate was promoted to the position of a chief financial officer.

A municipal manager in Kai !Garib local municipality at Kakamaas in the Northern Cape has only a matric certificate while a properly qualified woman, Antinuque Koetzee, has been sidelined.

Both Ditsobotla and Kai !Garib were among the poorest municipalities in both provinces. “That is what we call rotten fruits of cadre deployment,” Bili said.

He said he knew of municipalities that recruited mayors and speakers from the local supermarket staff because they happened to have political influence in the area. “How will these people be able to read minutes and write reports?” he asked.

“I came across mayors who wanted to write off municipal debt to remain in the good books of people and to be relevant to their political masters. When they do this, they always claim to be in touch with the masses when, in fact, they are killing the municipality,” he said. –