5 November 2004
Issued by: Office of the Presidency
Honourable Chairperson and Deputy Chairperson of the NCOP,
Honourable Premiers,
Honourable Members of the NCOP,
Honourable Chairperson of SALGA, Mayors and Councillors,
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Thank you very much for affording me this opportunity to, once more, address the NCOP. I would like to congratulate the NCOP for taking their sittings to the various provinces, thus taking government to the people and opening space for our provinces to interact with their public representatives. This is important because these interactions do ensure that we are better able, together, to address the many pressing challenges that confront our people.
In the recent Presidential Imbizo in Mpumalanga, many of the participants in the different parts of the province raised problems around lack of clean water, electricity, housing, proper roads and poor consultations by some of the councillors. They also spoke about crime, bad working conditions on the farms and unemployment.
Clearly, most of the problems articulated by the residents of Mpumalanga are the same as those raised in other Izimbizo in other provinces. I am quite sure that in the interactions of the Honourable Members of the NCOP with their constituencies, generally similar problems are raised. I have therefore decided that during this debate, we should pay some attention to the challenges of local government as the work of municipalities has direct and immediate impact on millions of our citizens.
Undoubtedly, we have, in the past ten years, made important progress with regard to fighting poverty and underdevelopment in our country, providing to many millions of South Africans, the basic essential services such as clean water, sanitation, electricity, housing and health services.
Although the lives of many of our people have improved since 1994, as we know, major challenges still lie ahead. Part of these challenges is that many of our municipalities, which are central to the implementation of government policies, still do not have the necessary capacity, even where resources are available, to implement government programmes and ensure that there is sustainable delivery of basic services.
We all agree that the sphere of local government is critical to our efforts of addressing the many challenges facing our communities. As we are aware, we have made the necessary advances with the rationalisation of local government structures such that today we have reduced municipalities from 843 to 284.
This rationalisation is part of our broader efforts to transform the sphere of local government so that we have municipalities that are non-racial, non-sexist and democratic; municipalities that serve all our people and have the requisite capacity to provide regular and reliable services to citizens as well as being at the forefront of the reconstruction and development of our country.
We need efficient and effective municipalities so as to deliver these better services, ensure that poor households have access to basic infrastructure and the poor are provided with free basic services. Further, as we accelerate the implementation of our expanded public works programme, we need strong municipalities to work in partnership with other spheres of government. Similarly, the Municipal Infrastructure Grant will not make the required impact if our municipalities are weak.
As we know, there are serious delivery backlogs which have denied millions of our people the possibility of a better life. We are aware of municipalities with large communities that have no access to clean water, sanitation and electricity.
To respond to this lack of capacity, in May of this year, Cabinet took a decision to develop a support initiative for local government structures, called Project Consolidate and constituted an Inter-Ministerial Committee for this programme. This project, which was launched this week, is led by the Minister of Provincial and Local Government, Minister Mufamadi.
Minister Mufamadi explained that: "As government, not only do we need to establish more policy coherence among the various dimensions of our work but also, we need to pay attention to the technical requirements for good governance. We had identified a number of municipalities that are experiencing a short-term need for an intense, hands-on support.
"We are assembling a high-calibre team, which will be deployed to work with municipalities to tackle the identified tasks. Since this support is meant to fade out over time, provinces will immediately replicate this process in order to position themselves such that they can continue to support municipalities in their own areas of jurisdiction. For their part, the municipalities concerned will fully embrace this as an opportunity for them to learn by doing."
(Project Consolidate booklet)
Before the launch of the project, an audit was done on municipalities, focussing at their capacity on service delivery and implementation of policies. This audit found that 136 of the 284 municipalities have little or no capacity to service their areas and therefore need urgent support to improve their delivery mechanisms.
The survey that was done by the Department of Provincial and Local Government found that deep levels of poverty as well as serious capacity constrains in many municipalities. For instance:
Clearly, we need a programme such as Project Consolidate to provide targeted focus and capacity building to all these municipalities which have the greatest need. These municipalities should be given support to build the necessary infrastructure and develop institutional capacity and systems that would ensure that they discharge their constitutional mandate.
Further, Project Consolidate will pay particular attention to the following areas:
We are indeed happy that as far as the perennial problem of the billing system is concerned, a number of private sector companies, most of which are in the information technology and financial services, have agreed to partner government and will accordingly deploy their expertise to assist identified municipalities with regard to this matter.
At the national level the Department of Provincial and Local Government together with relevant departments will establish a Support Unit and create the necessary mechanisms that will identify and unblock any obstacles towards better service delivery.
Similarly, the provinces will establish complimentary project management units and support structures that will ensure that provinces collaborate with municipalities to bring about better capacity and improved levels of service delivery.
Clearly, to ensure that there is a fundamental transformation in many of these municipalities, we have to work in partnerships with all sectors in our society such as state enterprises, the private sector as I have already indicated, trade unions, civic bodies and communities. Indeed, this is a clear and practical peoples' contract to push back the frontiers of poverty.
Accordingly, I would like to call also on the Members of the NCOP to join this peoples' contract and adopt this Project Consolidate as your own, mobilise in your constituencies around this programme and help in whatever ways necessary to add capacity to local government structures and ensure effective and efficient service delivery to all our people.
This is important because these interventions are part of government's broader programme of creating work and fighting poverty. It is a critical part of our reconstruction and development programme through which we seek to achieve a people's centred development.
Chairperson,
We are happy that we have already started with the deployment of community development workers. At the same time, there have been some suggestions that there are tensions between these workers and councillors and municipal officials. Government will investigate whether this is true and if so what are the basis for such tensions.
I would like to make it clear that these tensions, if they are true, are unnecessary because we trained and deployed these community development workers precisely because we are confronted with the many problems that we cited; problems that are most pronounced at the sphere of local government. Clearly, we need a number of interventions to effectively address these problems which exacerbate the already miserable lives of our people.
Many of these people are indeed too poor to even travel to municipal offices from time to time for their problems to be attended to. They usually do not have the necessary knowledge or information to deal with their daily challenges. They hear about many benefits and services due to them; yet, they hardly know how and where to access these.
In this regard, community development workers have to work directly with communities, not in competition with public representatives or other government officials, but to complement what each one of us is doing to push back the frontiers of poverty and alleviate the acute state of poverty experienced by our people.
We have to integrate the work of these workers with that of councillors so that together they can help to bring government closer to the people and ensure that government programmes reach all parts of our country. Again, I would like to call on Members of the NCOP to help in the integration of the work of community development workers with that of councillors and municipalities.
This past Wednesday, on the 3rd of November, Cabinet approved the Inter-governmental Relations Framework Bill whose objective is, among others, to make all spheres of government to work together to establish institutions and procedures that would ensure better coordination and collaboration in the formulation and implementation of government policies.
This is very important because the three spheres of government, as we have seen with Project Consolidate, have to work together in an integrated way. This Bill is important because we know that in the past there were instances when the different spheres of government were not sufficiently co-ordinating their programmes, where at times, provincial programmes would be made without proper discussions with local government and where similarly municipalities would formulate, for instance, Integrated Development Plans without consultations with provinces.
Honourable Members,
Let us work together to bring capacity to our municipalities and improve the work of our councillors. Let us ensure that the community development workers together with councillors do what they have to do to improve the quality of life of our people. We have a duty to see to it that all spheres of government collaborate as they should, so that the reconstruction and development of our country would happen faster.
I hope that in the debate that will follow in this House, we will expand further on the important interventions that we have to make together to ensure that we have vibrant, effective and efficient municipalities that would undoubtedly play their part as we build a better South Africa and a better world.
I thank you.