Lack of qualified officials still a challenge for most councils – analyst

The lack of qualified officials at local government level is to blame for the poor performance by most municipalities in the post-apartheid South Africa, a local government analyst has said.

The Johannesburg-based independent analyst, Fikile Bili, said the ANC government made the biggest mistake in 1994 when it deployed people without qualifications and capacity to run the municipalities.

He warned the ruling party there was no government in the world that would succeed without efficient local government structures.

“For as long as you deploy people in local government without capacity, experience and qualification, you will never render good quality services to the people.

“The municipalities are at the coalface of the people and residents have to be proud of them,” he said.

Bili’s statement came just a few months after auditor-general Thembekile Makwetu reported that many municipalities in the country continued to struggle to perform well in their audits. The AG revealed that a total of 14 municipalities had stopped producing clean audits.

The report showed that 15% of municipalities were improving, with 13% regressing and 67% not changing at all.

According to Bili, many municipalities in the country employed political activists without qualifications, as they have influence.

“People with no credibility and capacity to serve are deployed to pursue political mandates of wrong leaders rather than push service delivery to communities.”

He said uneducated mayors and semi-illiterate municipal managers with no relevant work experience were often hired.

“The type of mayors we have at local government don’t even have matric. They don’t have a vision on how to grow the town and the municipality as a whole,” Bili said.

He said the fact that, in one municipality, a former cleaner was currently a mayor was an indictment on cadre deployment by political principals.

“That is honestly undermining the vision of Mandela and Oliver Tambo. To allow dunderheads to lead academics in a municipality is mind-boggling indeed,” he said.

Bili alleged that at Ditsobotla Local Municipality in North West, a worker with only a wine-tasting certificate was promoted to the position of a chief finance officer. A municipal manager in Kai Garib Local Municipality at Kakamas in the Northern Cape has only a matric certificate while a properly qualified woman, Antinuque Koetzee, was sidelined.

Both Ditsobotla and Kai Garib were among the poorest municipalities in both provinces.

“That is what we call the rotten fruits of cadre deployment,” Bili said.

He said he knew of a municipality that recruited mayors and speakers from the local supermarket staff because they happened to have political influence in the area.

“How will these people be able to read minutes and write reports of the municipality? That person and that municipality won’t recover.

“I came across mayors who wanted to write off municipal debt because they wanted to remain in the good books with people and to be politically relevant to their political masters. When they do this, they always claim to be in touch with the masses when in fact they are killing the municipality, as it has no revenue to survive on,” Bili said.

He, however, praised Namakwa District Municipality for having produced credible mayors and officials despite being rural. He attributed that to the “hard work” of the district mayor, Bentley Vass.

He said the Northern Cape had visionary leaders such as ANC provincial chairperson Zamani Saul, to whom he attributed the deployment of qualified people.

“Dr Zamani Saul does not allow people who are not qualified to occupy senior posts in state institutions because he is a highly qualified leader himself.”
– ericn@citizen.co.za