Frances Baard District Municipality
Honourable Speaker and Deputy Speaker
Honourable Members of the NCOP
Honourable Members of the Provincial Legislature
Members of the Executive Council
The Director General of the Province and Heads of Departments
Senior Government officials
Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen
On behalf of the Provincial Administration and the people of this beautiful Province, I wish to welcome the first visit of the NCOP to the Province. As the Province we value and appreciate the oversight work that the NCOP conducts and commit to taking the observations, findings and recommendations that the NCOP will produce extremely serious.
We view this oversight work as an important element that strengthens the endeavours of Government as we work hard to create a better life for all our people in this Province in our pursuit to build a Modern, Growing and Successful Province.
This Provincial Week under the theme, “Building Sustainable, Responsive and People-Centred Municipalities”, provides yourself as Permanent Delegates, an opportunity to return to the Province and meet with both provincial and local Government leaders regarding service delivery in our province, As the theme suggests, it also places us in a position to reflect on the state of our municipalities in the Province and areas were we need to focus on in creating a noticeable difference at the coalface of service delivery.
Honourable Members of the NCOP, it is also our belief that working together we can do more with regard to reducing the triple challenges of poverty, unemployment and inequality - ills which continue to plague the lives of our people.
This morning we shall be receiving presentations that speak to the state of local government and the financial viability of our municipalities. During this reflection, we need to be brutally honest with ourselves if we are to correct the weaknesses in our municipalities to ensure that they achieve on their mandate as outlined in Section 152 of our Constitution. Let us remind ourselves that the Constitution lists among others the following as the role of local government:
- To provide democratic and accountable government for local communities;
- To ensure the provision of services to communities in a sustainable manner;
- To promote social and economic development;
- To promote a safe and healthy environment; and
- To encourage the involvement of communities and community organisations in the matters of local government.
We also realise that in strengthening the role that local government must perform, we also need to strengthen our monitoring and oversight role at both district and provincial government level to ensure sustainable development at local level. The President of the country, Mr Cyril Ramaphosa, in the 2019 Presidency Budget Speech, identified the “pattern of operating in silos” as a challenge which also leads to the, “lack of coherence in planning and implementation and has made monitoring and oversight of government’s programme difficult”. Poor co-ordination has yielded fragmented service delivery and has diminished our ability to collectively and coherently diminish the impact of the triple challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment.
We must however acknowledge that performance monitoring from the Office of the Premier does not extend to the local government level due to the critical capacity challenges in Monitoring and Evaluation. It therefore becomes critical to establish a more coherent relationship between the oversight departments namely the Provincial Treasury, COGHSTA and Office of the Premier responsible for monitoring local government performance.
At the same time we must also acknowledge that the monitoring of the impact of governments performance especially within the district and local government space is fragmented. Strengthening the co-ordination of monitoring of performance at all levels becomes necessary to improve accountability.
This co-ordination needs to start by bringing all oversight bodies into one platform on matters of local government performance by triangulating the performance of local government, driven from the centre. This will entail investigating the creation of a single co-ordinating governance structure that will bring together all oversight bodies (OTP, Provincial Treasury, COGHSTA) as well as other key stakeholders such as SALGA as key role players on monitoring and providing support to local government. This structure will be able to conclude an overview of performance and highlighting the areas of intervention required to improve service delivery.
Through such a platform both financial and non-financial performance (service delivery) will be analysed and correlated to establish challenges and blockages to service delivery. We cannot continue to separate the financial performance from what is visible on the ground in terms of service delivery – this against the backdrop of the increased community service delivery protests. Wastage of the scarce resources and maladministration will receive critical scrutiny.
To get to this point some practical matters will be looked at:
- Using the Premiers Intergovernmental Relations Forum to more intensively deal with local government performance matters – deal with strategies to unblock challenges.
- Investigate a platform for Municipal Managers to report progress – aimed at knowledge sharing – also sharing of expertise.
- Engage COGHSTA on the local government monitoring tools – towards developing integrated tools on key outcomes and performance indicators – to reduce the reporting burden of the many numerous reports (noting as well the capacity constraints within municipalities).
- Begin to capacitate Districts – to provide further support to municipalities (in line with the New District Co-ordination Model.
- The Districts will become a co-ordinating Hub – and will need to become the strategic interface between provincial and local government sphere. In the State of the Province I highlighted the fact that we will begin to strengthen the districts to improve the audit outcomes. Strengthening the monitoring mechanism and tools will therefore begin at a district level.
Honourable Chairperson, in the presentations that will follow my colleagues in the Executive Council will give physical evidence on how we as a Province will aim to improve the performance and service delivery level in our local government sphere. I wish you fruitful deliberations and look forward to your assessment and recommendations at the end of this week.
As I conclude, I wish to, once more, express our appreciation to the National Council of Provinces for your visit to the Northern Cape. We trust that with your assistance and with your valued buy-in, you will be our constant companions on our journey of creating a Modern, Growing and Successful Province.
I thank you