WHITE RIVER – “We are not okay,” said the premier Mr David Mabuza of the province’s municipalities on Thursday.
He was speaking to Mr Peter Ndoro on Morning Live, SABC 2’s prime-time breakfast show. The New Age Breakfast meeting was recorded at Ingwenyama Conference & Sports Resort with other media houses, government representatives and business people in attendance.
Ndoro came down hard on the premier about the cost of his vehicles and the state of the province’s roads. The live and television audiences could also pose questions for the premier to answer. Three of these centred around the performances of municipalities. Only two in the province received clean- audit reports from the Auditor-General last year.
“We are not okay. We have not reached the level that is acceptable to me. Some of these municipalities are in remote rural areas. It is very difficult to attract skills to these areas or to pay for these skills. They will probably continue to grapple,” Mabuza said.
His solution to the problem was to check the finances of the suffering municipalities on a monthly basis to prevent a problem from developing, but he added, “We need leadership in municipalities. Municipal managers and mayors must provide leadership and stay connected to their people.”
He explained the revenue management of municipalities was related to the bigger problem of unemployment and poverty. “This causes the municipalities to remain poor because they have to provide services to people who cannot pay for them.”
According to Mabuza, the way forward is for government to intervene in the second economy. “The two economies are still separate. It is a myth that to intervene in the first (formal) economy will affect the second. We need to find a way of improving small business and people’s access to land. We must invest more in skills so that the economy is better placed with skilled people.”
He claimed that 20 years into democracy and after five years of his term as premier, the government was indeed intervening. He, however, blamed difficulties like the willing buyer, willing seller principle and infighting among communities for the fact that only
38 000 hectares of the targeted
120 000 hectares had been returned to the original owners, and the fact that only 30 of the targeted 292 farms had been recapitalised over the past five years.
The premier also had to explain the picture of the teacher taking a bath in the pothole on the R36 in Machadodorp since people were tweeting it. He said it was an exaggeration of the problem.
