Programme Director
Outgoing CEO of FNB Public Sector Banking, Mr Kgosi Ledimo
Incoming CEO of FNB Public Sector Banking, Mr Sipho Silinda
Senior Executives from First National Bank, SALGA and COGTA
Mayors and Municipal Managers
Councillors
Ladies and gentlemen
 
It is my special delight and honour to be part of this FAME initiative this morning and to share a few words in opening this important workshop.

We are united in this partnership with FNB, by the vision of wanting to see better performing municipalities that can provide top class services to our people.
 
Improved skills, experience and shared knowledge is very critical in changing the governance, financial management and service delivery situation in our municipalities. That is what makes this workshop important as part of taking forward our Back to Basics programme.
 
Also important, is our willingness to change and embrace a new way of working. In his state of the nation address three months ago, President Ramaphosa rallied the nation behind a new dawn and urged all public servants to become agents of change in this country. He called upon public officials as servants of the people to embrace new discipline of doing things correctly, completely and timeously, so as to improve the situation in our country. As all of us know by now, the credo of the new dawn has been encapsulated in the compelling lyrics of the song, Thuma Mina – Send Me; send me to go out and make a difference in my ward, in my community, in my municipality, my department and in my country.
 
This is the invigorating spirit that we have embraced with enthusiasm and we said count us in, send us, we want to go and make a difference.

The President also committed to visiting departments, and as COGTA we are one of the few fortunate ones already honoured with this visit two weeks ago before we tabled our budget vote. During the visit the President emphasised that COGTA is the engine, the lifeblood of this government, and urged us to really work hard to turn the situation around and make a difference in our communities. All municipal officials attending this workshop bear that responsibility, to serve the people selflessly and efficiently.
 
The President also urged us to honour this year of Nelson Mandela by restoring diminished trust of our people in public institutions through serving them dutifully.  On 27 April 1994 in Inanda, after casting his first democratic vote, former President Mandela said : “Our message is that the basic needs of the masses of the people must be addressed: the creation of jobs, of houses, the introduction of electricity, building of schools and hospitals, providing free, compulsory quality education, running water, paved roads. These are our priorities.”
 
These are still our priorities even today. In the CoGTA budget vote recently, we underscored the importance of the local government sphere due to its proximity to the people. Everything happens in a ward and in a municipality. It is in the local government sphere where the battle against poverty, lack of services and against all impediments to better life for all is fiercest, where we who are sent there should spare no effort to turn the situation around.  
 
This is the primary site where our social contract with the people should be realised, the real pulse of our nation, where we dare not lose focus. For this reason, we are building stable, well-functioning municipalities, which should be proactive and responsive to the needs of the people.
 
Our municipalities must be able to provide services in an efficient and professional manner, putting our people first, in line with the Batho Pele principles.    

The dire situation that we are facing at the moment is that 31% of our municipalities are almost dysfunctional and the same percentage is dysfunctional, making it an aggregate of 62% worrisome municipalities. A total of 11 municipalities are under Section 139 intervention as they cannot fulfil their executive obligation in terms of the Constitution, and 87 distressed municipalities are now under intense focus. Many municipalities owe prohibitive amounts to Eskom and Water Boards, R16.2 billion and R7.4 billion respectively, to be precise. Most have aging infrastructure which cannot meet the needs of the rapidly risen urban population.
 
The net effect of this litany of challenges is lack of service delivery to the people, which aggravate human suffering and trigger protests, and that is where we say send us, we want to make a difference and we are going to do it, working with provincial government and municipalities.
 
We are intervening at various levels, one of which is municipal governance.

Appropriately qualified and experienced people have to be employed in the positions in the municipalities, and we have set timelines, all vacancies within the correct municipal structures have to be filled in three months so that service delivery is not delayed any further.
 
We are also intervening at the level of infrastructure development. Many municipalities experience a systemic problem of skills shortage, which explains non-delivery so manifest in over and underspending on the programmes.
 
One example is debilitative underspending on the Municipal Infrastructure Grant, among others on account of lack of qualified engineers to oversee the infrastructure projects.  We established that only 55 out of 257 municipalities have qualified engineers to assist in these projects.
 
The impact of this deficiency is poor services to the communities, which in some instances, for lack of understanding, can easily be passed off as corruption and fan unnecessary flames of protest.
We are dispatching with immediate effect 14 technical teams to the dysfunctional municipalities to build capacity, and the rest of other teams will be deployed by December this year.
 
These teams are composed of engineers, construction and project managers, financial experts, town and regional planning experts and administrators who are expected to build permanent capacity in the municipalities. This will among others enable the municipalities to spend their municipal infrastructure grant to enable improvement of the municipalities.
 
A key area of intervention is municipal finances, which are also a key factor in service delivery. Working together with the National Treasury, we are devising strategies to strengthen financial controls in the municipalities. One of the ways is to take a very harsh line against disclaimers because essentially they indicate that there is no basis for even a basic assessment or audit of the functions of the municipalities, including how funds are expended. We have set our timeframe of twelve months to address the situation of disclaimers, as well as many other financial leakages in the system.
 
COGTA is rolling out the implementation of the Municipal Specific Revenue Plan in selected municipalities nationwide to assist them with financial and revenue management.
 
In broadening partnerships, we have secured the goodwill and commitment of business to help in the municipalities. All of these partners appreciate that local government is everyone’s business. That is why we are here today working with FNB.
 
We have forthwith also started visiting municipalities in various provinces to address these challenges. So far we have been to the Eastern Cape and the North West Province and we will cover the rest of the country in due time, directly looking at distressed and dysfunctional municipalities and finalising solutions with the provincial and local government leaders. Service delivery has to be improved sooner rather than later, and we will continue to share the many interventions that we are rolling out to improve on this aspect.
 
Another key aspect we need to fix is the politics and its impact on the functioning of municipalities.

The interference of political structures in governance is one area we need to attend to. Also key on our agenda is to find solutions to the killing of councillors and other political leaders in some provinces which is unacceptable and which we condemn very emphatically. I have been tasked by MECs responsible for local government to request a meeting with the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security Cluster to discuss the killing of councillors and its impact on local government. The killings take away human life and breadwinners and also rob communities of their leaders that they have chosen.
 
Preventing the murders also become a serious expenditure item for the affected municipalities as protection has to be organised for the councillors. We are looking forward to the meeting.
 
We urge our communities to report the perpetrators to the police so that we can put a stop to these despicable actions.
 
I would like to assure you that there is a new dawn not only in the country but in the local government sphere as well.
 
Yesterday STATSA released the non-financial census of municipalities 2017. The report shows that consumer units receiving services from municipalities increased between 2016 and 2017. Provision of sewerage and sanitation rose by 3.8%, solid waste management improved by 2.6% while provision of water and electricity grew by 2.1%.  
 
Of the 3.5 million indigent households as identified by municipalities, 2.6 million (75,4%) benefitted from the indigent support for water, 2.1 million for electricity (59,5%), 2.2 million (62.6%) for sewerage and sanitation, while 2.5 million (71.9%) benefitted from the indigent support system for solid waste management.

The report simply illustrates that municipalities do provide services, however marginal and despite all the challenges, and that if we pay immediate attention to all the problem areas identified both by us and the AG, they can make as radical a turn as they slid into a drastic downward spiral.
 
This is the time for change in local government sphere.

Let us embrace it, all of us. Let us say that we want to be there to turn the situation around in all our municipalities!
I wish you fruitful deliberations which should translate into tangible outcomes in this financial year.
 
I thank you.