Thread by @NationalCoGTA

The 13th National Municipal Managers Forum is underway in @City_Ekurhuleni, Minister #ZweliMkhize rises to deliver a keynote address. It's a #Thread

Thank you for inviting me to this 13th National Municipal Managers Forum. #SALGA13NMMF

This meeting follows the successful hosting of the 12th National Municipal Managers Forum at the Mbombela City Local Municipality in February 2018. #SALGA13NMMF

Since April this year I have been visiting various provinces and meeting various stakeholders on the mission of building effective and fully functional municipalities. #SALGA13NMMF

I have been looking forward to having this conversation with you as municipal accounting officers and heads of administration on whom we rely to make the Municipal Recovery Plan that we launched earlier this year succeed. #SALGA13NMMF

I believe that today I am in the right place, meeting the right people, at the right time and I believe from here we shall all go out to do the right thing- to turn those municipalities around. #SALGA13NMMF

Minister #ZweliMkhize: Things must change!

We have identified several aspects of municipalities that affect their ability to perform as any ideal municipality should. Amongst those aspects are the following issues of:
* ̶ Governance
* ̶Financial Management

* ̶Infrastructure and Services
* ̶Fighting fraud and corruption and
* ̶Political interventions.

If municipalities must change, the municipal managers must be in the fore front of that change. Change in local government is in your hands! #SALGA13NMMF

Our system of wall to wall municipalities was purposefully designed to serve all our people equally and to create a platform for the implementation of the services which reflect the human rights which are enshrined in the Constitution. #SALGA13NMMF

The local government space is the platform wherein programmes to transform society must be launched to achieve a better life for all our people. #SALGA13NMMF

When we declare that our vision is a united, nonracial, non-sexist, free, democratic and prosperous South Africa, the local government space is the platform where this has to be launched. #SALGA13NMMF

The struggle for democracy was waged by countless men and women who dedicated their lives and made many huge a sacrifice to usher in this democracy, such as President Nelson Mandela, Albertina Sisulu and many others. #SALGA13NMMF

The centenary commemoration of these giants this year reminds us, especially those in this sphere of government closest to our people, that you have to run with this baton that our stalwarts have passed to our generation. #SALGA13NMMF

You have been trained and employed to take off where our struggle for freedom stopped, to create a machinery for service delivery that will deepen democracy and serve all our people, transforming our society and our country’s economy. #SALGA13NMMF

This means that our struggle for full freedom is not over but will continue through the policies and programmes that our government will implement at all levels. The success thereof will be a satisfied citizenry and an improved quality of life. #SALGA13NMMF

In short, as managers, you have to make democracy meaningful to all particularly the poor and marginalized communities. #SALGA13NMMF

You are called upon to serve our people with the best of your ability, skills and experience, without any fear, favor or any hint of partisanship. Our people do not deserve anything less than the very best. #SALGA13NMMF

Your inability to do so will make our people feel that there is still a need to wage another struggle to attain a better life. #SALGA13NMMF

There is no room for inferior services, complacency, incompetence, indolence, dishonesty or mediocrity. #SALGA13NMMF

The dignity and respect for municipal administration must be restored; and be restored fast! #SALGA13NMMF

Minister #ZweliMkhize: The buck stops here! #SALGA13NMMF

Municipal managers control the engine of municipal administration which spans over 257 municipalities, covering every square centimetre of our land. #SALGA13NMMF

We all know that everything happens in a ward and in a municipality. For anything to happen in any aspect of the life of our people and our country, local government must work, and, it must work well. #SALGA13NMMF

The municipal systems and finance management legislation gives powers and full authority for the municipal managers to take responsibility and steer municipalities in the right direction under the leadership of the elected councils. #SALGA13NMMF

Municipal managers must take responsibility for good governance in the councils. In short, municipal managers must stick to the letter and spirit of the law to take local government to the expected level of service delivery. #SALGA13NMMF

Local government administration was created to take forward the wishes and aspirations of our people and satisfy their basic needs. #SALGA13NMMF

These include the provision of safe water, sanitation, energy, roads, social infrastructure to support health, education and other social amenities that make life liveable and sustainable. #SALGA13NMMF

Municipal administration should be completely professional, technically competent and must be staffed by motivated public servants whose only interests is the service to our people. #SALGA13NMMF

Municipal staff that have business or other private or personal interests or wish to dabble in politics, have no place in a modern municipal establishment. #SALGA13NMMF

Those who wish to make their first few millions in business while serving as municipal officials or those who wish to use council as preparatory grounds for future political office are in the wrong place. #SALGA13NMMF

Everyone has a right to be interested in politics or business, but these interests cannot be allowed to distract managers from what they are employed to do. #SALGA13NMMF

Everything has its time and space. Let us keep it simple in municipalities: leave politics to politicians, business to the private sector and keep the administration to public servants! #SALGA13NMMF

The focus of municipal administration must be to achieve effectiveness and impact on service delivery and leave politics to politicians. The roles must be clear! #SALGA13NMMF

We have analysed the factors above that result in poor performance and we are restructuring #COGTA at the national level to be better suited to support all municipalities long before they fall into the category of dysfunctionality,

wherein interventions by the higher sphere become inevitable. #SALGA13NMMF

The Constitution has assigned specific responsibilities to municipalities as a separate and an independent sphere of government. #SALGA13NMMF

Since the advent of the wall to wall local government, there has been 127 interventions in municipalities, largely under section 139 of the Constitution or other municipal legislation. #SALGA13NMMF

This has raised a debate about the effectiveness of the support that the national and provincial spheres of government offer in terms of Section 154 of the Constitution. #SALGA13NMMF

There has therefore been a huge amount of introspection in the National departments to look at how better to support the municipalities and leave the interventions to be the acts of last resort that the Constitution envisaged. #SALGA13NMMF

As you would be aware, the Municipal Recovery Plan support is based precisely on the principle of strengthening support to the municipalities to reduce the numbers of municipalities where Constitutional interventions are imposed. #SALGA13NMMF

In a few municipalities, the once-off interventions are not even adequate to ensure improvement as they fail to recover, thus resulting in repeat interventions. #SALGA13NMMF

That is not ideal as it begins to suggest that chronic failure of local government is a reflection of the failure of government as a whole. #SALGA13NMMF

We are determined to turn municipalities around! We want that mindset to be entrenched in the minds of all municipal leaders, both elected councilors and appointed officials, as attitudes of “business as usual” or “we have seen all this before” can be a huge obstruction to change

I must be the first to acknowledge the many municipalities that are dysfunctional as a result of the design that rendered them structurally non-viable due to being an amalgamation of small towns and villages . . .

And peripheral townships, devoid of their own revenue base and only dependent on the transfers from the fiscus. #SALGA13NMMF

You can read the full address by Minister #ZweliMkhize bit.ly/2QyR1Vy

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