to those now stipulated in the regulations. The Institute for Municipal Finance Officers deplored this situation, saying: ‘It is impossible to get … sustainable … service delivery if the financial management in a municipality is in a shambles.’74
In the interim, cadre deployment at local level has continued. Yet in May 2011 an article in the Financial Mail blamed cadre deployment and corruption for the growing malaise in local administration, saying: ‘Using municipalities as employment agencies for ANC cadres as well as dishing out corrupt tenders to companies without the capacity to deliver is mainly what has destroyed local government capacity.’ Transformation policies and ‘the push … to provide jobs for the politically connected’ had forced out hundreds of professionals with engineering and financial expertise, the report went on. In addition, the ANC seemed willing to tolerate corruption in procurement – and even to regard it as beneficial – if the firms that were awarded municipal contracts were prepared to donate to its coffers in return.
The consequences were now evident in the collapse of many municipal projects and services, the article continued. The government claimed significant successes in rolling out clean water, better sanitation, electricity, and refuse removal. ‘But this delivery record masks a bitter reality: many users do not enjoy access to these services as pipes and pumps are broken, refuse removal is infrequent, and pit latrines were improperly constructed so that they fill up too soon and become unusable.’75
Cadre deployment has also made it difficult to sanction senior municipal officials responsible for maladministration, the article warned. Even where offenders have been disciplined and threatened with dismissal, their political principals have often redeployed them to similar posts in other municipalities. Added the Financial Mail: ‘Hundreds of municipal officials fired from one ANC-controlled municipality for mismanagement, corruption, or abuse of power are often quickly rehired in others because they are cadres with strong connections to local politicians who use their influence to secure another deployment.’76
The Municipal Systems Amendment Act of 2011 and its accompanying regulations are supposed to curb this practice by placing a 10-year ban on the re-employment in any municipality of senior managers dismissed for financial misconduct, fraud, or corruption. However, these new rules became operative only in January 2014 and will take time to have an impact – assuming they are properly implemented at all.77
Financial management
In October 2009 Terence Nombembe, the then auditor-general, warned that roughly 80% of national and provincial departments were failing to keep the monthly records required by the Treasury, while 40% of them had no meaningful financial information at all. Partly as a result, national and provincial expenditure identified by Nombembe as ‘unauthorised, irregular, or wasteful’ rose to R20 billion in 2010/11 and increased even further to R25 billion in 2011/12 before declining slightly to R24.7 billion in 2012/13.78
A lack of relevant skills plays a key part in this malaise, as Nombembe has repeatedly pointed out. According to him, the root of the financial mismanagement and waste he has uncovered lies in ‘the appointment of inadequately skilled people to crucial positions, particularly in finance’. Says Nombembe: ‘Unless we fix that, most of the problems we have are never going to go away.’ 79
Nombembe’s audit report on municipal finances in the 2011/12 financial year painted a bleak picture, showing that financial management at local level had generally deteriorated since 2009. Nombembe once again identified the skills shortage as a key reason for poor performance, saying that 73% of municipalities (up from 70% the year before) had vacancies in one or more of their three most important posts – municipal manager, chief financial officer, and supply chain management chief. Moreover, where such posts were filled, one-third of them were occupied by people who lacked the right skills. This opened the system up to corruption, especially in procurement. Unauthorised and irregular spending had thus risen yet again, while an increasing number of councillors and officials were running businesses on the side to which municipal contracts were then awarded.80
In 2013 research by the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection said that a lack of skills among local councillors also played a major part in poor performance. A ‘substantial number’ of councillors were ‘employed into positions for which they were not qualified’, it said. Moreover, because most councillors lacked professional qualifications, they were ‘dependent on political office for an income’ and full of anxiety that they might not be redeployed into such posts in the future. Accordingly, many councillors ‘used their positions for self-enrichment’ by influencing the allocation of municipal contracts in their favour and ‘building themselves a nest’ in case they lost office in the future.81
In December 2013 a new auditor-general, Kimi Makwetu, was appointed to replace Nombembe, whose seven-year term of office had expired. Makwetu’s diagnosis of the reasons for poor performance remained essentially the same, for in February 2014 Makwetu told Parliament that ‘a large number of senior managers in charge of government finances were not competent enough to occupy their positions’. He added that ‘most senior finance managers failed to meet required competency standards’, while a number of chief financial officers had been appointed without the necessary training in accounting. This weakness lay ‘at the heart’ of poor financial management in the public service.82
Water and sanitation
Since 1994 the treatment of sewage and other waste water has declined to a disturbing degree. In 2008 the Water Research Commission conducted a survey of 80 small and mainly rural water-treatment plants, finding that most of them were badly run. The commission blamed the problems it encountered not only on inadequate funding and poor monitoring equipment but also on a lack of skills. ‘A lot of the operators have only Grade 10 or a matric. This means they can cope with the basics of operating, but they cannot fix problems … In addition, the lack of monitoring equipment means that many plants only find out there is a problem when people start falling ill.’83
Also in 2008, Anthony Turton, a senior water researcher at the state-funded Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), warned that South Africa’s water quality was ‘deteriorating fast’. There was also limited expertise available to rectify this, as half the country’s municipalities lacked even one qualified engineer. Turton added that toxic cyanobacteria was already present in many of South Africa’s river systems because domestic and industrial effluent was being inadequately treated. ‘Cyanobacteria produces a group of toxins which are present in South Africa’s water to an alarming extent, and have already resulted in the fatal poisoning of livestock and game. Though there have been no human fatalities to date, the effects of long-term exposure to the poison are unknown,’ he warned.84
Turton had been scheduled to deliver a conference paper on the gathering water crisis, but was instead suspended by the CSIR and charged with insubordination. However, much of his paper had already been circulated and was publicly available. An editorial in Business Day commented that the most alarming aspect of Turton’s paper was that the demand for technical ingenuity in responding to the water crisis far outstripped supply. ‘What he really means (and probably the reason he has been suspended) is that white engineers have been run out of jobs in municipalities. [Hence,] many poor towns no longer have any capacity to process water and thus protect their citizens from disease.’85
In 2009 the Department of Water Affairs introduced ‘blue drop’ and ‘green drop’ reports to monitor the treatment of drinking water and waste water respectively. In 2009 the average national score on the blue drop report on drinking water was a meagre 51%, but this improved to 73% in 2011 and then to 88% in 2012. However, the treatment of waste water remains poor. Though the green drop report for 2011 (the most recent available) put the national average score at 71%, it also acknowledged that more than half (56%) of the 821 waste systems it monitored scored less than 50%. In addition, the number of waste systems with this poor level of performance had doubled since 2009. Overall, 143 waste systems (17% of the total) were performing
