ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula has admitted his organisation is partly to blame for the deep-seated rot in local government, saying the unqualified people it deployed to run municipalities often ended up dabbling in fraud and corruption.
Local government is at the coalface of service delivery, but poor governance in that sphere has resulted in the deprivation of basic services. Most of the country’s 257 municipalities have been dogged by systemic corruption, looting, maladministration, political instability and mismanagement, evils that have severely affected service delivery.
Of the 257 municipalities in the country, 123 have cases of corruption being investigated by the Hawks.
Delivering the keynote address at the ANC’s local government intervention workshop in Boksburg, east of Johannesburg, on Monday, Mbalula said despite his party’s “achievements” of the past three decades, local government was in a severely weakened state. “Many municipalities are struggling to provide the very basic of services to their residents, few are able to perform the transformational function that the people expect of them,” he told the workshop.
The ANC, which is facing the real possibility of losing its electoral majority in the 2024 provincial and national elections, has been forced to review its track record in government. It lost Gauteng’s three metros of Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane during the 2021 municipal elections when its support fell below 50%. The Ekurhuleni and Joburg metros are, however now being run by a coalition of the ANC and EFF.
Control of the three metros is crucial as Gauteng has the largest number of registered voters in the country.
There are 26-million registered voters in SA, according to the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC). Of that number, Gauteng accounts for 6-million, followed by KwaZulu-Natal with 5.3-million, the Eastern Cape (3.2-million), the Western Cape (3-million), Limpopo (2.6-million), Mpumalanga (1.8-million), the North West (1.6-million), the Free State (1.3-million), and the Northern Cape (613,000).
On Monday, Mbalula said the rot in local government is not only an indictment of the leadership of the affected municipalities but “it is also an indictment on the ANC, which is the governing party in most of these councils”.
“Even where we are not in charge, in Johannesburg, people still look up to the ANC. We are not in charge in Pretoria [but] people still blame the ANC. It is the DA that is in charge. We have lost power in the last eight years or so in Pretoria. If there is a problem of water and cholera, they blame it on the ANC,” Mbalula said.
He said financial challenges in the municipalities are part of a “far broader crisis of governance, operational performance and legitimacy”.
“Many of these challenges arise from poor management of the political administrative interface. There is weak oversight, poor accountability and inadequate consequence management systems.
“We take time to take decisions even where we see that issues are very clear [and that] people are just undermining governance. In Mangaung, it took us, I don’t know how long, where people went to council, and undermined [the] ANC’s mandate. Only this year we took decisive action, we expelled them ... We must not be afraid to take decisive action where we are undermined,” Mbalula said.
Another problem was the employment of unqualified people in critical positions. “It’s a problem for us, we employ people without qualifications. We put them there,” he said.
“These circumstances create conditions for fraud and corruption. Local government officials have become managers of contracts. The tender system has weakened local government because we have outsourced everything. [This has] led to corruption, patronage and poor services. We don’t have skills to manage contracts.”
These issues combined have led to declining levels of voter participation, and diminishing electoral support for the former liberation movement.
He also weighed in on the issue of coalition governments, saying again that the ANC’s pact with the EFF to run Ekurhuleni and Joburg metros needed to be reviewed.
“You review anything you engage in. Are we gaining anything from these coalitions ... or are we losing? When you pose that question, it doesn’t mean you want to change anything. Nothing is static. [We need to ask:] is that [coalition] arrangement working for us or we are better off outside it?”
Mbalula said to turn local government around there needs to be improved political management, improved governance and administration, a strengthened fiscal framework and improved financial management, as well as improved service delivery.
“We know where the problems are in local government. From here, interventions must be made.... We have got to move with speed, decisively, regarding challenges we are facing as a movement and government. We need to demonstrate that we are in charge,” Mbalula said.
The ANC’s workshop comes two weeks after it held an event to review its 2019 election manifesto, when its ally, the SACP, criticised the ANC for moving slowly in implementing some of its election manifesto commitments.
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