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Without active community participation and empowerment, the challenge of ensuring effective accountable and clean local government will not be realised.

The ANC is committed to further strengthening the voice of communities and ensuring that all ANC councillors serve those they represent and are accountable to them.

Community participation in the structures of local government needs to be strengthened beyond what is happening in many areas. Consequently, government is working towards ward committees that are better resourced, more powerful and taken seriously by municipalities.

National and provincial government will provide support and resources for other platforms for local participation, such as community policing forums, community safety forums, street and village committees, school governing bodies, hospital boards and clinic committees.

Furthermore, municipalities would need to strengthen their work with self-organised formations (such as burial societies, stokvels, cultural groups, youth and women's clubs) and non-government organisations as part of the process of deepening local democracy.

Together, let us empower our communities!

The ANC government, together with the people, will:
Further strengthen the voice of communities and ensure that adequate support is provided for empowerment of communities on decision making processes affecting their lives;
Review and strengthen the legislative framework where necessary, for Ward Committees and community participation.
Ensure that 90% of all ward committees are fully functional and better resourced in the next five years;
Work together with communities to support community-initiated social activities such as burial societies, stokvels, religious groups and so on.
More effective, accountable and clean local government, working together with provincial and national government

The challenge - and new ways of doing things:

Since 2000 we have been developing a new non-racial, democratic and developmental local government system, which will ensure that municipalities assume their full role as enshrined in the country's constitution.

Many municipalities are functioning well, but many others, especially in the rural areas, are still struggling, lacking the capacity and resources they need to fulfill their functions.

This has led to some municipalities being unable to provide even a core of basic municipal services effectively and efficiently. As a result the pace of local development has been uneven, and some communities have been left behind.

Project Consolidate - in which national government sent in support management teams to remedy managerial failures - made a difference and brought improvements, but not enough.

Now we are taking things further. The government launched the Local Government Turnaround Strategy in 2009. It is a major initiative to consolidate and strengthen municipalities through active support from national and provincial government and effective community participation.

The challenges facing municipalities also relate to accountability. Many councillors have served their communities well - but many have not. What happens locally depends on effective cooperation between municipalities, provincial government and local government.

We need to ensure that national and provincial government do work more closely with local government to ensure that they fulfill their functions more effectively. Work is underway to review the powers and functions of all spheres of government to ensure a more effective cooperative governance system.

From top to bottom, under the leadership of President Jacob Zuma, government is monitoring implementation more closely to ensure that government does its job. The President put a new Minister in charge of monitoring and made all national Ministers sign performance agreements.

Where there has been under-performance the President has taken action to strengthen those areas. At the local level, some councillors and mayors who were not performing well have been replaced.

Government has also taken active steps to deal with corruption in local government. Where necessary the Special Investigating Unit has been called in. But a lot more needs to be done to intensify our campaign against corruption.

Working together, with national and provincial government, let us build effective, accountable and clean local government!

The ANC government, together with the people, will:
Ensure that all ANC councillors serve those they represent and are accountable to them. In this regard, the ANC will strengthen its own organisational system, which will allow greater community participation in choosing ANC local government candidates in future local government elections.
Ensure that each municipality publishes and regularly reports on its local performance plan with targets for improvement in local services, and be expected to achieve them. Where necessary, and informed by its monitoring mechanisms, national and provincial government will make interventions at local level to remedy weaknesses that are identified through the monitoring.
Ensure that national and provincial governments provide support to municipalities lacking capacity in management, and delivery of services.
Ensure that all national and provincial programmes, which are to be implemented locally, are clearly communicated and reported to communities.
Review tendering systems by making them transparent and deal systematically with corruption and shoddy contractual work. Contractors who have delivered poor services will be blacklisted and forbidden from doing business with any government structure.
Together, building on the progress we have made and learning from the experience of the past 17 years, we will need to do things differently to address these challenges, and we have already begun to do just that.

Together we can build better communities
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