Despite intervention by the North West provincial government in many of the province’s municipalities, some of them are still battling to render services to their respective communities.
The appointment of alleged incompetent senior officials, fraud and corruption, poor performance with regards to audit outcomes are reported to be some of the root causes for poor service delivery.
There are 22 municipalities in the North West province, 18 are local while 4 are district municipalities.
All of them are reported to be dysfunctional. This as they could not render proper basic services to their communities.
Political infighting among councillors, the appointment of alleged incompetent senior officials, fraud and corruption are believed to be the main contributory factors for the non-performance in these municipalities.
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While visiting the North West recently, ANC Secretary General Ace Magashule conceded that there are problems.
“There are challenges in terms of service delivery and that is why we are not blaming anybody. We are here to reinforce the work done by the Provincial Executive Committee, the IPC, our municipalities and we are going to strengthen them and work with them to ensure that we accelerate quality delivery of services.”
Premier Job Mokgoro is also worried about the abuse of scarce resources.
“Our municipalities in terms of service delivery leave much to be desired. Many of our municipalities appear to be a serious abuse of the scarce resources that we should be using for the betterment of our communities, especially the most marginalised communities. So, that is one area that really needs intervention. The infighting, especially as it happens amongst leaders as it happens among councillors, is another aspect that is very shocking.”
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Turnaround plans
The newly-appointed MEC for Cooperative Governance, Human Settlements and Traditional Affairs, Mmoloki Cwaile, says his administration has put plans in place to turn around the situation.
“We want financial stability to be established at the level of municipalities. We need administrative stability in terms of filing of key positions. We need the municipalities to start with their mid-year AFS draft because we want to make sure that we get improved audit outcomes. But importantly, we have said we must improve on the planning and implementation of infrastructure.”
Cwaile did not mince his words as far as the appointment of incompetent officials is concerned.
“On the issue of those who are incompetent, we will make that assessment and where we have a person who is not meeting inherent requirements for the position we will make a redress, either by virtue of redeployment elsewhere, or invoking a disciplinary process to remove the person.”
Cwaile has appealed to communities to remain patient saying service delivery should improve soon.
