Local government: Support teams for dysfunctional municipalities

Engineers and town planners have been dispatched to distressed, dysfunctional municipalities countrywide to ‘improve the management of key infrastructure, especially in predominantly black residential areas’. This is noting the billions of rand in municipal infrastructure grants either returned to the fiscus or reallocated from underspending to better spending municipalities, reports Pam Saxby for Legalbrief Policy Watch.  ‘We want to solve, once and for all, the problem of money being sent back,’ Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Zweli Mkhize said yesterday when he launched the initiative. The 81 professionals appointed to ‘support’ struggling local authorities with infrastructure maintenance and new projects are also expected to ‘build permanent capacity’.

Scheduled to run until the end of April 2021, the technical support programme will be implemented in tandem with one aimed at addressing shortcomings in financial management, governance and administration. As Legalbrief Today has already reported, Mkhize has nevertheless conceded that ‘a new attitude and approach’ will be fundamental to its success. Following the Minister’s meeting in June with ‘dysfunctional and distressed municipalities’ in the Mangaung metropolitan area, a Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs media statement noted that the culture of non-payment for municipal services where they exist ‘continues to drive … (the authorities concerned) deeper into debt’. Councillors are being ‘urged’ to devise ways of reversing this trend.

As Legalbrief Today has also reported, during March, speaking at a local government indaba in Kwazulu-Natal, Mkhize warned that ‘no Treasury staff can cure the impact of illegal political instructions, badly researched council decisions and (the) poor supervision of (a) mayor and accounting officer … abdicating (their) responsibilities’. Expressing concern about previously well-performing municipalities showing signs of ‘regression’, the Minister referred to ‘high’ levels of ‘political in-fighting and instability’ often stemming from weak political coalitions; the number of critical posts either remaining vacant or filled with ‘unskilled personnel’; non-compliance with rules and regulations, especially in supply chain management; the ‘inappropriate spending of budgets’; fraud and corruption; and ‘general incompetence’.