Has the ruling party finally woken up to the disaster that is local government in the country?
With each passing day, evidence emerges that the most important tier of government has all but collapsed, with the most recent being calls for the entire North West Province to be placed under administration due to nearly every local municipality being dysfunctional.
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Inaction
In many articles, I have lamented the inaction, inability and/or unwillingness of the ruling party to intervene and address the issue.
There is certainly no shortage of awareness of the problems: I was struck by the irony of the premier of Gauteng recently convening a summit dealing with dysfunctional municipalities in the province – almost all of them run by the party he represents!
That the issues were identified as far back as 2004 when then-president Thabo Mbeki created his Operation Consolidate, there can be no doubt.
Non-starter
Yet in 2009, an ‘Assessment of Local Government’ report commissioned by then-President Jacob Zuma’s administration revealed scant improvement in the situation and Minister Pravin Gordhan’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign in 2012 proved to be a non-starter.
There is little doubt that local and district government structures have become hostage to the internal problems plaguing the ruling party, with the residents and ratepayers as unfortunate victims.
However, some optimists are seeing a glimmer of light at the end of a very dark tunnel, in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s launch of Operation Khawuleza which aims to use district governments as hubs to begin pulling local government back from the precipice.
There is much in this new plan to support this optimism, particularly:
Stronger co-ordination between the other arms of government in projects and resource mobilisation
Greater focus on public-private partnerships
More accountability and consequence management from officials
Focus on enhancing the social compact between residents and municipalities
While on paper the plans are laudable, they will come to nothing if the president does not speedily and comprehensively resolve the political divisions within his party. PULL OUT QUOTE PLEASE
These manifest themselves in obstruction and sabotage of many a good initiative.
And as Mpumelelo Mkhabela wrote in his recent News 24 Online article: ‘The most important challenge for Ramaphosa and Dlamini-Zuma is to prove Khawuleza is not one of the many we have seen before.’
After matriculating, Vijay Naidoo studied Economics in the UK. Upon his return, he joined the family construction business as MD for 10 years.
He subsequently joined his sister in their furniture manufacturing business as director for quality assurance and operations. He was responsible for all quality aspects of their products, and led the project to the business achieving an ISO 9000 quality accreditation. As an export focused business, this was important for our international competitiveness.
Mr Naidoo has an abiding interest in quality management and productivity improvement, particularly in manufacturing.
More recently, he has focused a lot of his time on giving back to the community by way of mentorship of small businesses and sitting on the executive of the South Coast Chamber of Commerce. He also sits on the Board of the Ugu South Coast Development Agency.
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