Dysfunctional municipalities continue to hamper the roll out of crucial infrastructure projects financed by the Developmental Bank of Southern Africa, its CEO Patrick Dlamini once announced. In fact, the major obstacles are political and until these are dealt with, ‘the National Developmental Plan ambitions and desire to deal with inequality and eliminate poverty in rural areas is going to be a very far-fetched dream.”
Dlamini, who took over as CEO three years ago, has made it clear that the bank’s performance should be judged on its success in financing infrastructure development at local government level.
And, the message was also reinforced by the bank’s Chairman Jabu Moleketi. Hence, the increasing service delivery protests and plummeting popular confidence in local government (according to figures released in September 2015 by the Presidency), raised questions about the bank’s performance, or at least the impact of its interventions.
Projects are being hindered by a lack of transparency, which is a polite word for corruption, and too much bureaucracy.
As a result it’s taking ‘forever’ to bring projects to market, and this discourages the would-be private investors with which the bank looks to partner.
According to Dlamini, it is other people’s money that they are leveraging into these projects. “Therefore those parties are very interested in seeing something that is really transparent and that has a very strong governance, because their stakeholders demand returns for their co-operation in these projects,” said Dlamini. More transparency and less red tape are utterly non-negotiable.
In fact, the larger metros are way ahead in terms of their ability to generate and administer infrastructure projects. But the performance of most local governments is woeful.An undeniable fact is that about 180 municipalities are under-resourced. They have very poor overall skills capacity and governance is just not in place, which makes it very difficult.
Mr Dlamini pointed to an urgent need to look at the ‘restructuring’ of local government at an operational level to raise their capacity, including their supervisory capacity, where the planning and procurement for the projects are done.
He also highlighted the need to ensure that very strong leadership is provided once and for all to sort out the challenges at local government level.
Dlamini also pointed out that the bank is working closely with the National Treasury and the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs to improve the situation but, it seems, politics gets in the way. It is a politically charged environment.
Hence, there is a need to highlight the challenges to send a message to politicians that if you want the electorate, or the poorest people, to be serviced, you need to change the way you are doing things.
Let’s hope this is not going to fall on deaf ears.
Philani Hadebe from the Bhekuzulu area is a freelance journalist who majored in Political Science.
