By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Deputy President Paul Mashatile has called on political parties to work together to bring much needed stability and economic growth to South Africa.
“We want stability in the country, we want economic growth [and] we want a South Africa that is prosperous. We want municipalities to be stable… we want to make South Africa work. We can do it if we ensure stability in the country,” he said.
Mashatile was addressing a media briefing at the National Dialogue on Coalition Governments in Cape Town.
“The Minister of CoGTA [Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs minister Thembi Nkadimeng] remains my key partner in driving this because, as you have seen, we are quite focused at local government where we have more challenges. So the Minister of CoGTA is key because the dialogue itself felt that there is an urgency in addressing challenges at local government level.
“We will definitely be looking at how these engagements will allow us to go down to local government to ensure that we have stable coalitions that are focused on good governance and serving the people even much better than they have been doing up to now,” he said.
The Deputy President said further engagements will be held in order to thrash out finer details.
“We only finished commissions [on Saturday], the secretariat needs more time to factor in the comments of political parties so they agreed that we will finalise the declaration once we have taken into account [political parties] comments.
“The most important thing is that all those who participated felt that we are going to need more engagements. There were issues where political parties expressed different views…that they felt need further refining.
“But generally, the idea of a national framework is agreed to but the issues of how you are going to implement it, whether you need legislation or regulation, those are the issues that are going to go for further refinement,” he said.
Meanwhile municipalities have been falling far short of the revenue-raising targets that were once expected of them, as revenue losses eat into their earnings.
This is according to Zamo Gwala, the acting chief officer of municipal finance, fiscal policy, and economic growth at the South African Local Government Association (Salga), who was speaking at the annual conference of the South African Revenue Protection Association (SARPA).
Gwala made reference to a white paper on local government published in 1998, that claims that municipalities should be able to finance 90% of their day-to-day expenditure.
‘Municipalities have sufficient revenue-raising powers to fund the bulk of their expenditure,” reads the white paper.