The Ethics Institute (TEI) – a Gauteng Municipal Integrity Initiative Project – gave the metro a thumbs up after assessing its ethics and anti-corruption management maturity.
The metro received a score of 84.0 in the assessment.
Designed to analyse and identify ethics risks, the assessment served as a basic gap analysis for Gauteng municipalities to assess their anti-corruption capacity between May and June 2017.
The assessment informed by 2015 Local Government Anti-Corruption Strategy – Integrity Management Framework defined scores using the following compliance rating scale:
• 100 – Full compliance.
• 75 – Good compliance, but minor improvements can still be made.
• 50 – Moderate compliance.
• 25 – Weak compliance – Minor progress has been made, but there is still a long way to go.
• 0 – No compliance.
The ethics and anti-corruption maturing assessment focused on various indicators obtained through electronic and paper-based survey formats.
Indicators used included the state of leadership in council commitments, community ownership focusing on the availability of avenues for the public to report allegations of non-ethical and corrupt practices and mechanisms for prevention and resolution.
Regarding governance, the indicators examined the existence of audit committees, municipal public accounts committees, the council disciplinary committee and/or council ethics committee.
Furthermore, the assessment included prevention of unethical and corrupt practices through the promotion of a professional ethical culture, municipal values statement, the code of conduct adopted by the metro, anti-fraud and corruption policies and procedures, amongst others.
TEI put under the microscope the metro’s ability to detect unethical behaviour using internal audits, analysis of information, whistle-blowing mechanisms and data management.
Other important key indicators during the assessment involved the Integrity Management Framework, policies relating to investigation, resolution, monitoring and reporting, risk management processes and awareness campaigns.
“While the City of Ekurhuleni has proven to be in good compliance, there is an acknowledgement that more can still be done to achieve a full compliance status.
“In this regard, the city’s intervention to acquire a full compliance status includes rigorous consequence management, enhanced communication strategies, enhancing processes for addressing community concerns, sustained training and awareness campaigns, measurement of ethics through performance management, independent commissioner of integrity that will enforce the COE Integrity Framework and screening and vetting of suppliers and other high risk stakeholders,” said Themba Gadebe, spokesperson for the metro.
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