Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister, Pravin Gordhan, says national government has looked at ways of strengthening municipalities at district level in order to improve the overall performance of local government.

“There are district and local municipalities in certain parts of the country that are fairly weak or financially unviable or have difficulties in attracting the right level of capacity,” explains Gordhan. This statement was made after the after a meeting of the Presidential Coordinating Committee (PCC) earlier this week.

Gordhan stressed municipalities need to employ people with high levels of skills, capacity and competence to address the challenges they face.

He also outlined the fact that some municipalities faced the challenge of having a small population of councillors and very limited or non-existent revenue, making them entirely dependent on transfers from national government.

“Those are the policy issues that we said we will look at further in preparation for the next meeting to see how we can enhance overall performance of municipalities,” he explained.

The Minister also stated that the PCC meeting was a follow-up to the Presidential Local Government Summit (PLGS), which was held in mid-September, to which all the mayors and municipal managers from the 278 municipalities of South Africa were invited.

“We needed to understand what worked in these municipalities and what did not work, and we developed a programme called Back-to-Basics,” says Gordhan.

The Back to Basics programme states unequivocally that municipalities need to do what they are supposed to do regarding delivering services to the people, communicate effectively with communities and manage their finances well, among other things.

Other issues that the meeting addressed were the state of local government in the country; demarcation of municipalities in preparation for the 2016 local government elections; acquisition of land for the development of municipalities; municipal budgets and expenditure, as well as general issues relating to procurement reforms in government.

The PCC meeting was chaired by President Jacob Zuma and all Premiers were also present. South African Local Government Association members also formed part of the PCC meeting.