By Shaun Benton

Cape Town – The performance contracts of all municipal managers are to be renegotiated by July 1st this year, the Minister of Public Service and Administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, said on Monday 15 May.

She was speaking to journalists during a briefing by government's Governance and Administration Cluster, at which Provincial and Local Government Minister, Sydney Mufamadi, was also present.

As part of ongoing efforts to strengthen local government and enhance its capacity to deliver basic services, the performance contracts of municipal managers will “be informed by the new Integrated Development Plans”.

This is in line with what Mufamadi calls the “mainstreaming” of hands-on support to local government in order to improve municipal governance, performance and accountability.

A stepping up of efforts to support local government comes in wake of Project Consolidate, which was launched last year to assist municipalities that were struggling to deliver basic services ranging from sanitation and sewerage, refuse removal, clean water, housing and other services to needy communities.

With 186 municipalities countrywide now “candidate municipalities” for Project Consolidate, according to Mufamadi, national government's intervention and support of these municipalities by providing funds where necessary and service delivery facilitators to enhance their capacity would be reviewed once the system had been in place for two years.

In the meantime, new “generic performance contracts” would be made available to all municipal managers by the end of May, said Fraser-Moleketi.

This follows a national analysis undertaken of Integrated Development Plans (IDPs) drawn up by local governments in April. All provinces and key national sector departments – such as the departments of public service and of provincial and local government – took part in this analysis, which probed the potency of the development plans drawn up by municipalities to guide future developments, such as for infrastructure and economic advances, in their domains.

The purpose of this analysis was to provide “specific feedback” from national government to each municipality regarding their IDP, reporters heard.

“Almost 80 per cent of the draft IDPs were assessed and measures to strengthen them before adoption by councils were identified,” said Fraser-Moleketi.

The value of the decision to provide municipal managers with generic performance contracts lay in the ability of these contracts to be more refined and better tailored to the different conditions faced by municipal managers in different areas, said Mufamadi.

He added that challenges faced by a manager in a rural municipality, for instance, would be very different from those faced by a municipal manager in metropolis like Johannesburg, hence the need for a more refined and tailored contract rather than a “one-size-fits-all” type model as government started to hone in on the specific problems arising at the coalface of delivery.

“The performance agreement must bear relation to the actual challenges as they are identified on the ground,” said Mufamadi.

“That way you are beginning to eliminate the possibility of having wrong people in wrong positions within municipalities where we are told there are under-qualified personnel in critical posts.

“We are not going to take kindly to any manifestations of a performance at the level of municipalities that give us a feeling that we are not going to meet the targets that we have set for ourselves,” the minister said.

On the question of salaries, Mufamadi brushed off charges that some managers earn more than ministers or even the president, saying that salaries would remain market-related in order to attract and retain the skills necessary to effectively meet the delivery needs of communities.

“Do we want to have people with the right skills in these positions?” the minister asked.

Mufamadi added that national government was trying to discourage inter-party petty politicking in certain municipalities that was undermining service delivery.

He added that the turnout of voters in the Project Consolidate municipalities was higher than the national average and said he believed that this was a reflection of the confidence people had in the Project Consolidate interventions of national government.

Reporters also heard that 48.4 per cent of registered voters turned up to vote in local government elections on March 1 that elected over 9 000 municipal councillors.

• Performance benchmark for city bosses
• Municipalities’ finances still in disarray
• Mufamadi defends managers’ salaries

Source: BuaNews