Expert help for municipalities - Gordhan

Johannesburg - Officials from the national department of co-operative governance and traditional affairs are being deployed to 122 of the 183 municipalities in the country to assist them in delivering the required services, says
Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Pravin Gordhan.

The department was also providing assistance where required to ensure that corrective measures were carried out to “improve audit outcomes”.  While this was primarily the responsibility of the national treasury, Gordhan said municipalities were being supported to develop action plans in response to audit outcomes.

Enock Mthethwa, an ANC MP, noting that most municipalities - most particularly those in rural areas - were not performing or were performing badly, asked how his department intended to strengthen the municipalities to ensure compliance with all services” and the achievement of clean audit reports.

Operations and maintenance

Gordhan, the former finance minister, said through the municipal infrastructure support agent (Misa), his department was currently providing “hands-on” support to at least 122 municipalities throughout the country.

Misa was an institutional vehicle to manage and co-ordinate the provision of support to enable local governments to develop and manage operations and maintenance infrastructure for service provision “more effectively and efficiently”.

Most of those municipalities were in rural areas and they were predominantly in KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, the Eastern Cape and North West.

He noted that there were 48 engineering professionals and seven planners supporting municipalities with technical support to plan for and develop municipal infrastructure. This was critical to smoothing delivery of services - water, electricity and sewerage - to citizens in the affected towns.

Support was also being given to beef up the human resources of municipalities through an artisan development programme, bursaries for students studying the build environment. Officials were also trained in infrastructure and service delivery.

Budget shortfalls

Gordhan said: “The number of municipalities that continue to under-perform in relation to infrastructure and service delivery remains unacceptably high. It is for this reason that CoGTA (the department) intends to strengthen its technical capacity to support municipalities.”

Owing to the inadequate revenue base in most rural municipalities, Gordhan noted, these areas relied heavily on grants from the national revenue fund for operational and capital spending.

“As a result of budget shortfalls, most of these municipalities have not been allocating finance in their budgets for operations and maintenance.”

Gordhan said his department would work with all municipalities to ensure that they set aside at least 7% of their operational budgets on infrastructure maintenance.

The latest audit of local government - for the 2013 year - saw just 22 municipalities achieving clean audits, but this was up from only 13 the previous year.