The government has completed its first independent assessment of metro performance.
Councils have also signed off on eight key accountability requirements for the initial group of seven participating metros as part of the second phase of local government reforms under Operation Vulindlela.
The reforms introduce a performance-linked incentive structure that ties access to national funding to demonstrable improvements in governance and management. Access to national support will be conditional on demonstrable progress.
The metro trading services programme, with a budget of R54bn over seven years, is driving technical support for local governments.
“These metros will be able to access their incentive allocation through the adjustments budget,” reinforcing a performance-linked model rather than unconditional fiscal transfers, the Operation Vulindlela phase two report notes.
Metros must develop and ring-fence trading service units capable of operating on commercial principles.
According to the progress report released in October, services are “on track to establish a single point of management accountability and financial transparency, with updated business and investment plans by July 2026”.
The country’s local government sector continues to be dogged by fruitless, wasteful and unauthorised expenditure amounting to billions of rand, fraud and corruption, poor service delivery, and a dearth of competent, skilled personnel at decision-making and management levels.
The trading services reforms aim to address the rapidly deteriorating quality of services in most metros, largely the result of severe underinvestment in infrastructure and maintenance for at least a decade.
The reforms aim to create fully integrated utilities with professional managements that are fully accountable for delivering the services, collecting the revenues and looking after and investing in the assets.
The review of the white paper on local government has begun, and the government has received 266 responses to the discussion paper released in May to guide the process.
“An updated white paper on local government will be finalised by April 2026, with five thematic reference groups established to contribute to this process,” the progress report says.
The joint unit between the presidency and the National Treasury is already preparing to bring private-sector capacity directly into municipal systems.
Speaking at an Operation Vulindlela briefing on Friday, Rudi Dicks, head of the project management office for Operation Vulindlela, said, “We’ve been engaging with many of the businesses around technical capacity to be deployed in local governments, into metros, for example, and there’s no shortage of offers that are there on technical capacity they will support, on revenue collection.
“The partnership of business remains committed; as you know, they committed a huge amount of technical resources and support for some of the other reform areas, like corruption.” .”
He emphasised that fiscal resources had been earmarked centrally, adding that “The bigger driver of the reform is actually within our budget, and that’s for the metro trading services programme that is there.”
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