By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Thembi Nkadimeng says the state of the majority of municipalities was worrisome and required immediate support from government to deal with the challenges of poor governance and service delivery.
“We are seeing a deterioration in almost all our metros and municipalities. Capacity is central. We are working around the clock to assess the municipalities”.
Nkadimeng was speaking during the briefing at the ANC NEC meeting this weekend, which is taking place in Birchwood.
She said 163 municipalities are currently distressed and 66 dysfunctional.
According to Nkadimeng, there are 257 municipalities in South Africa. These comprise of eight metropolitan, 44 districts and 205 local municipalities. They are focused on growing local economies and providing infrastructure and service.
This means 229, or 89.1%, of the country’s municipalities are not working properly.
Earlier this year, Auditor General Tsakani Maluleke revealed in the 2021/2022 local government audit outcomes that only 38 out of 257 municipalities achieved clean audits. She said this represented a deterioration in local government across the board.
Deputy President Paul Mashatile said the challenges facing the municipalities were multidimensional and related to poor governance, weak institutional capacity, poor financial management and political instability, which negatively affected service delivery to communities.
He stated: The problems are just not leadership or poor governance; it is also a lack of economic activity. There are municipalities in South Africa where there is no economic base to generate revenue.
To address these challenges, Mashatile said, Cogta had conducted oversight visits to six provinces where these dysfunctional municipalities are based – North West, Gauteng, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga – in order to assist them with interventions.
He said:This was to ensure that we resolved the challenges of poor governance and a lack of service delivery in these areas. Furthermore, during our outreach programme, we have identified areas for improvement in coordinating service delivery interventions related to infrastructure backlogs and providing access to essential services.
Mashatile said government was also working through the District Development Model (DDM) to improve intergovernmental relations between the different spheres of government to tackle the problems in distressed municipalities.
The DDM is designed to address problems with service delivery by allowing all spheres of government, from local municipalities to national government, to work together in a more effective and coordinated way.