Government is working to ensure that all distressed and dysfunctional municipalities have access to a district support team by December, says Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Deputy Minister Andries Nel.

Speaking at the recent Vision 2030 Summit, he reported that 87 municipalities were currently in distress.

The Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs had deployed district support teams comprising engineers, construction and project managers, financial accountants, town and regional planners and government and administration experts to assist municipalities.

Such teams, he noted, had so far been deployed to 55 of the country’s most distressed and dysfunctional municipalities.

Nel further pointed out that, under the leadership of Minister Zweli Mkhize, the department was deliberately reaching out to all parts of South Africa to assist municipalities.

“We have a duty and responsibility to ensure that those municipalities function the way they are supposed to; therefore, we are reaching out to academia, professionals and businesses to hear about their experiences with these municipalities, so that they can come in and assist”.

Further, Nel noted that, to address the problems facing these municipalities, the department had initiated an intensive recovery programme focused on government service delivery.

“We’ve also taken measures to ensure that senior staff who are dismissed from one municipality do not occupy positions in another municipality,” he added.

The key failure in local government, he lamented, was the inability of municipalities to adequately spend funds on basic infrastructure.

Of the 257 municipalities in South Africa, 226 currently receive municipal infrastructure grants. Only 55 have a qualified engineer.

Nel noted that, since the 2012 financial year, R3.4-billion of the municipal infrastructure grants had been reallocated from underspending municipalities to those who were able to spend these allocations.

“This effectively penalises not only poorer municipalities, but, more importantly, it penalises the poor citizens of those municipalities that don’t have the capacity to use these funds”.

To overcome this, Nel said the department had engaged with a number of municipal organisations to assist it in ensuring that municipalities had the required skills to function optimally.

Using the skills shortage to empower the youth, the department's Municipal Infrastructure Support Agent (Misa) was involved in a number of programmes to upskill the youth.

Misa is responsible for delivering on the department’s infrastructure commitments.

As part of its skills development efforts, an apprenticeship programme works towards training artisans to operate and maintain municipal infrastructure.

Further, a young graduates programme ensures that graduates receive the necessary training to assist in the delivery of municipal infrastructure.

“We’re currently exploring partnerships in tertiary institutions to roll out our young graduates programme so that we can effectively address the skills shortage in municipalites,” said Nel, adding that these measures would hopefully go some way towards transforming the municipal space and promoting local economic development.

Meanwhile, the National Development Plan (NDP) envisages a larger portion of the South African population living closer to their places of work by 2030, and that the transport used to commute is safe, reliable and energy efficient.

This, Nel stated, required five things – strong measures to prevent further development of housing in marginal areas; increased urban densities to support public transport; more reliable and affordable public transport and better coordination between the various modes of transport; incentives and programmes to shift investment towards dense townships; and focused partnerships with the private sector to deal with the growing gap housing market.

“Our success or failure in this endeavour will really influence whether we become a nation untied in diversity, as our Constitution says, or whether we remain a country where we live together separately.”

The successful implementation of the NDP required strong leadership from government, business, labour and civil society, said Nel, adding that South Africa needed society to work together towards a common purpose.

“To do this, we need to build trust between major [government] social departments,” he said.

He further reiterated government’s responsibility for a large share of implementing the NDP.

To achieve this, government would need to strengthen its accountability channel, improve its capacity, as well as be prepared to make difficult decisions, while working with others in society to solve the challenges, he concluded.