Gauteng ANC meets to discuss ‘deteriorating state of local govt’

The African National Congress (ANC) in Gauteng is holding a summit to discuss what it describes as the deteriorating state of local government.

Last week, Cooperative Governance MEC, Lebogang Maile, raised concerns over the risk of nine of Gauteng’s 11 municipalities possibly becoming dysfunctional.

ANC Gauteng is hosting the Local Government Summit to confront challenges faced by the government and to propose measures aimed at making sure that, municipalities in Gauteng focus on delivering on their constitutional mandate.#LocalGovSummit#GrowingGautengTogether pic.twitter.com/NoDsSLXM6V

— Jacob Khawe (@JacobKhawe1) August 26, 2019

Maile highlighted fraud, corruption, poor financial management and backlogs in service delivery as key issues plaguing municipalities.

Gauteng ANC chairperson of the PEC sub-committee on local government, Matome Chiloane, explains some of the issues to be discussed.

“There are many other factors that are affecting the disgracing of municipalities; amongst others – the economic situation in certain districts. Westrand and Sedibeng have a problem of revenue collection as some of the residents are unemployed so they are unable to pay for their services. Also, we need to look at the institutional capacity because some of the senior managers were not qualified or adequately skilled to do certain functions. So it is a broad number of issues, not just corruption, but where there is corruption, we are acting.”