Recovery plan needed from municipalities
"Our state of readiness for a Covid-19-free province must include well-functioning municipalities with a strong political and administrative leadership, characterised by stability".
During the department’s virtual Munimec meeting last week, KZN MEC for Co-operative Governance & Traditional Affairs (CoGTA) Sipho Hlomuka urged the province’s 54 municipalities to plan for a post-lockdown recovery in their respective jurisdictions to ensure that residents and businesses return to normalcy as soon as possible once the current restrictions have been lifted.
“Before we look to the future, we must first acknowledge that, as local government stakeholders in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, our municipalities have continued to function and that basic services have been delivered to our communities, whose welfare depends on the regular provision of water, electricity, refuse removal and the like,” said Hlomuka.
At the same time, Hlomuka acknowledged that keeping taps and electricity meters running during the lockdown did not come without a hefty price. The general economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been felt by municipalities, with a resultant non-payment factor given the financial distress felt by communities and businesses. The revenue impact on municipalities has been significant.
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“In order to ensure uninterrupted supply of water in particular and electricity going forward, our municipalities need to revive their revenue collection and to do that, they need to do everything in their power to stimulate their local economies for the benefit of residents and businesses. To achieve this, we need far-reaching and wide-ranging plans of socio-economic recovery in the post-Covid-19 era,” said Hlomuka.
“Our state of readiness for a Covid-19-free province must include well-functioning municipalities with a strong political and administrative leadership, characterised by stability. This implies functional councils and oversight structures, a consistent spending of capital budgets with no monies returned to the national fiscus, clean audits and sound financial management of our public funds,” said Hlomuka.
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