DEAR Editor,-
Ugu District Council appointed a consultant to conduct a skills audit of the 839 employee workforce to establish whether employees possess the competencies and skills to achieve council’s objectives.
Regulations of the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA), as well as the Amended Systems Act, require that persons reporting directly to the municipal manager, as well as the municipal manager himself, must have the skills, expertise, competencies and qualifications.
The municipal manager meets all requirements and the general managers beaver away to get them, if they do not have them yet. The survey revealed that no less than 43 employees have had the benefit of higher education, with two doctorates, nine masters’ degrees, seven honours degrees and 25 bachelors’ degrees. I was not able to establish whether any of them were registered as professional engineers.
On the face of it, the administrative side seems to be reasonably well-equipped to implement policy decisions taken by the council, whose executive committee can be likened to directors of a company.
We councillors, who make up the political side of the administration, have been spared the possible embarrassment of listing our credentials. There are only two requirements in law – we must be South African citizens and we may not be certified lunatics!
Yet it is us councillors who are required to determine how a budget of a billion rand a year is to be spent. In the opinion of the Auditor-General, we run the municipality so badly that he has disowned us by giving us a disclaimer, which is the worst possible opinion in his armoury.
It seems that whatever else is expected of us politicians, financial prudence and understanding of accounts and economics is not at the centre of the selection process for councillors.
DAVE SNASHALL
