WHY LOCAL GOVERNMENT WILL NEVER WORK UNDER CURRENT FORMAT

It has been reported by SALGA KZN that government departments in Kwazulu-natal owe municipalities R3.8 billion in outstanding rates, water and electricity charges.

Add to this the billions that are owed by individuals and it should be obvious to all why local government is failing and will continue to fail; there simply is not enough money to finance the operations of municipalities.

Under the present local government format there is no future for local government; it will just continue to collapse.

The non-payment for services is not the only cause of municipal services heading towards the disaster zone.

In 1994 all municipalities had a capital reserve known as the capital development fund, which in each municipality had been accumulated by the forced contributions from annual revenue collected of an amount of between 3% and 5% of income.

In the case of the City of Durban its capital development fund was sufficient to finance most, if not all, of its annual capital expenditure needs. Durban was self-funding. Today it is financially broken with urgent capital expenditure not being carried out because there is no money.

So what happened to get into the current state of financial collapse faced by most, if not all municipalities, in KZN and most of the rest of South Africa, including metros like Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane, Johannesburg, Mangaung and Ekhureleni?

At the time of the 1994 takeover of municipalities by the newly elected ruling party, municipalities had to adopt a new financial management system which included the appropriation of the accumulations in the capital development fund of each municipality in order to finance election promises of free water and electricity.

The desired political objective was achieved but the financial pantry of each municipality was left empty. The family silver had been given away.

The net result of this decision was that most municipalities were left with no means of internally funding the upkeep and maintenance of infrastructure and the replacement of plant, vehicles, etc, needed to provide services.

Capital expenditure projects now had to be funded by the ‘begging bowl’ method, whereby application for funds has to be made to national treasury for each project.

Presently most municipalities barely raise sufficient cash to cover operating costs, excluding infrastructure maintenance.

It is no wonder that roads are just collections of potholes, old water and sewer mains are in urgent need of replacement and electricity outages, due to collapsed infrastructure as opposed to Eskom load shedding, are more frequent.

Add to this the fact that politicians and not engineers decide which projects are to be implemented and you have a recipe for disaster which is now evident throughout most of South Africa in the current state of municipal infrastructure.

The current state of affairs cannot be fixed unless there is a complete rethink of how municipalities, especially capital maintenance programmes, are to be funded.

Until every council has detailed maintenance programmes for every service, prepared by engineers as opposed to politicians, service delivery will continue on the slippery slope towards total collapse.

The state of local government disaster cannot be fixed under the current legislation.

There is an urgent necessity to have a national, Codeatype meeting of all interested parties - business, academics, economists, labour and ratepayer organisations, industrialists, investors, etc, in order to develop a new financial model for local government.

Most municipalities exist now just to pay salaries. Service delivery is barely on the agenda, except immediately prior to elections.

South Africans expect and demand action to stop this rot in local government. Basic service delivery is a human right entrenched in our constitution.