The South African Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) has expressed disappointment at the state of the country’s municipalities.
This comes after the presention by the Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta), Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma during the department’s budget vote in Parliament yesterday.
Samwu’s general secretary Dumisane Magagula today said Dlamini-Zuma painted a very worrying picture of the country’s municipalities.
“In delivering the departmental budget vote speech, Minister Dlamini-Zuma revealed that 60 of the country’s municipalities are dysfunctional, with 43 requiring mandatory intervention through Section 139,” he said.
Magagula said the minister further revealed that 100 more municipalities were on the brink of dysfunctionality.
“As Samwu, we are convinced that the challenges faced by many municipalities are financial in nature,” Magagula said.
“In this financial year, the National Treasury has only allocated a little over R100 billion towards the department of which only R96 billion will be used as transfers to municipalities to subsidise their operations.
“Municipalities are therefore expected to raise the other bulk of the remaining resources that would be needed to efficiently deliver services to residents.”
Samwu then reiterated its previous calls that municipalities were heavily underfunded.
“The funding model of municipalities neglects the fact that many municipalities serve rural and poor populations who are unable to pay rates and taxes thus putting these municipalities under serious financial constraints,” said Magagula.
He said that for municipalities to be stabilised, there are several interventions needed from Cogta, the National Treasury and government as a whole.
“Seemingly both provincial and national governments have failed to play their supervisory role over municipalities as enshrined in Section 154 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa.”
The union is also of the view that many of the challenges faced by municipalities throughout the country could be addressed if municipal Councils stopped politicising the appointment of accounting officers, being municipal managers.
“We further call on municipalities throughout the country to put in place revenue collection mechanisms from government departments and businesses,” Magagula said.
“Municipalities should also ensure that the little resources which they have are maximised and used in the interest of servicing residents and not enriching politicians and tenderpreneurs.”
