Issued by: Gauteng Provincial Government
19 OCTOBER 1999 MEC'S;
Councillors
Distinguished Guests;
Ladies and Gentlemen
I am greatly honoured to address you on this important occasion. As the Gauteng Provincial Government we are humbled by the honour your have accorded us. I am aware that through our actions, we make our history and are makers of our own destiny. I also know that we do this not in the circumstances of our choosing.
We inherited a local government that discriminated on the basis of race, gender and physical disability, a government that fostered urban and rural divides. Necessarily the allocation of human and financial resources reflected and reinforced these distinctions. Apartheid presented to the democratic South Africa backlogs in infrastructure and arrears and debts of formerly black local authorities.
While we have done all we can in the last five years in redressing the past, through laying the foundation of our democracy at local, provincial and national levels, the apartheid legacy still weighs heavily on us, especially at local level.
As we carry our historic duties, we are still confronted with the challenge of how to turn the wide variety of local and distinct municipal structures we have inherited from the past into dynamic institutions of local democracy which can address the impoverishment and disempowerment of our people. In order for local authorities to fulfil their political mandate there should be a common commitment to the notion of developmental local government, with a strong focus on the strategic role of local government in promoting social and economic development at a local level.
Partnerships with communities, NGOs, private developers and government in mobilizing the resources, even with limited resources at our disposal, would make a significant impact on addressing abject poverty and service backlogs in our province.
In this way, on the basis of these innovations in service delivery mechanisms and best practices, we can make a firm commitment to the partnership approach as a central pillar of our local government strategy.
In line with this partnership approach, there is, I believe, a paradigm shift taking place in the way we view tasks of infrastructure delivery.
While we are all familiar with the lack of basic service and infrastructure, which characterize our province, we must be acutely aware that some of these infrastructure projects have collapsed because they were not properly operated and maintained.
What this means to us is that sustainability has to be the watchword in all our enterprises.
There is a significant shift towards fiscal decentralization that seeks to create the environment for municipalities to take responsibility for financing and operating their own infrastructure development and service delivery. The Gauteng Provincial Government still stand by its commitment to build the capacity of local government structures to enable them to run their affairs more efficiently and effectively and deliver the services they are expected to deliver to the people.
The acid test of service delivery would be the extent to which ordinary people at local level are able to take decisions on the manner in which their streets, their blocks and their entire areas, as well as their schools, clinics and farms are run and managed.
This ethos of quality service delivery at local level is not going to be possible unless our local government structures and the political leadership in this tier of government are accountable.
They must be accountable to those who elected them. On issues of delivery and the management of financial and other resources, we need to bring about higher levels of delivery to our people.
We must, however, avoid falling into the trap of thinking that we exist, as government, to fulfill a narrow understanding of accountability. The DP's conception of accountability is one that seeks to elevate them to the status of the main party the ANC government should account to.
We must not apologise to anyone for our people-centred approach to the principle of accountability. When we meet in Council Chambers and the provincial legislature we do so to account primarily to our people without reducing this democratic principle to that of promoting the narrow watchdog role of the official opposition This understanding of the principle of accountability should impel us into moving into a new local government dispensation with more determination and urgency.
I am confident that you will not let the people down. I am certain that local government will become a pillar of quality service delivery and the realisation of the noble goal of a better life for all. I would like to leave you with a question, is the Greater Pretoria Metropolitan Council ready for the challenges of the 21st century? There is only one answer to this question. It is the successful implementation of programmes through which our people's lives will become the living antithesis of socio-economic conditions under apartheid rule.
I wish you success in this most noble of ventures.
I thank you.
Issued by Thabo Masbe Spokesperson for the Premier Tel: 082 551 4945