The lack of well-established infrastructure development, operations and maintenance within local municipalities remains a key impediment to the delivery of services and the full enjoyment of Constitutional and human rights by citizens.

These challenges can, however, be overcome through developing local municipalities into non-partisan, professional entities committed to serving their communities, says South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) commissioner Philile Ntuli.

This message was provided, along with a summary of the myriad challenges local municipalities face in delivering, operating and maintaining infrastructure and providing basic services, and the severe problems citizens experience owing to the lack of services, by presenters during the SAHRC webinar on local government service delivery through infrastructure development and management.

Speakers who participated in the webinar, which focused mainly on water, wastewater and sanitation owing to the gravity and urgency of these problems across South Africa, highlighted that multiple, consecutive reports and recommendations by the SAHRC and other statutory and research organisations to address the challenges of water and sanitation service delivery have been ignored or only partially implemented by local municipalities and national government departments.

The reasons for the reticence and/or inability to implement corrective recommendations are similarly multifaceted and include a lack of technical skills in local municipalities to plan, design, develop, operate and maintain infrastructure; a lack of incentives and disincentives to underpin professional conduct; a lack of long-term planning and planning capacity; and rigid budget rules, as well as unsustainable revenue from basic service delivery, besides others, said municipal technical skills organisation Municipal Infrastructure Support Agency (Misa) infrastructure delivery management deputy director-general Pati Kgomo.

The complexity and interrelated nature of the identified problems preventing the effective and efficient delivery of services require the collaboration and cooperation of all three spheres of government and all stakeholders, including communities, civil society organisations and the private sector, to solve.

"For example, an SAHRC investigation into the challenges surrounding water and sanitation provision in Tshwane and Roodepoort found that the reasons that the wastewater treatment plants were dysfunctional were similar [to those] across all nine of South Africa's provinces and include insufficient budget allocations, continuous changes of municipal managers and a lack of skills and human resources to maintain the wastewater treatment plants," said SAHRC economic and social rights researcher Sinethemba Memela.

"Through the investigative report, the commission found that there is a dire and urgent need to upskill and capacitate people working in municipalities, as well as that municipalities should employ people not only on the basis of their skills, but also on their integrity and commitment to serving the community," she emphasised.

This finding by the SAHRC coincides with the National Development Plan's objective to promote the professionalisation of municipalities, which essentially means that local municipalities are less partisan and focused instead on hiring the right people with the right skills to provide services to their communities, she added.

"South Africa, as a water-scarce country, has to adopt a multifaceted approach to ensure the Constitutional guarantee of sufficient access to water for citizens is met, and simultaneously ensure that such a scarce resource is carefully managed to benefit future generations," she says.

DISTRICT DEVELOPMENT MODEL PILOT

Encouragingly, there has been a significant willingness by all sections of society to help improve local government performance and effectiveness, said Waterberg district municipality municipal manager Precioustone Raputsoa.

"Nongovernmental organisations, commercial businesses, civil society organisations, government agencies, organs of State and communities have signalled their willingness to help support the transformation of local municipalities to effective and efficient authorities that have the wellbeing of the local communities and provision of services as their encompassing culture," he said.

The Waterberg district municipality is one of three districts, alongside the eThekwini and OR Tambo municipalities, that are piloting the district developmental model (DDM).

Raputsoa noted that issues of inadequate governance, a high degree of instability, fraud and corruption compound problems in many local municipalities, not only in the Waterberg district, but across South Africa. These issues  compromise oversight and service delivery, and contribute to outages and collapse of infrastructure and related services.

"While municipalities are required to allocate 7% of their budget to operations and maintenance, this is not the case in most municipalities, and these challenges are also exacerbated by poor revenue collection in local municipalities."

Additionally, there are challenges in terms of capability in municipalities, with most municipalities in the Waterberg district not having sufficient people to capacitate their functions, he said.

"Further, when we engage businesses to partner with us on some initiatives and provide funding, they raise the valid concern that a lot of money is being returned to the fiscus by underspending municipalities. This return of grants owing to non-spending is as a result of human capital constraints," he noted.

The combination of constraints, instability and challenges has led to a trust deficit between communities and the municipal councils, but the aim is for these issues to be addressed through the DDM, says Raputsoa.

"The DDM can, in many ways, be a practical intergovernmental relations mechanism through which all spheres of government can work together with communities and stakeholders to plan, budget and implement infrastructure delivery in a more coordinated manner," concurred Ntuli.

The role of stakeholders is of paramount importance, added Raputsoa, and the Waterberg district, as part of the DDM pilot, has rolled out leadership training for municipal officials and civil society organisations in collaboration with civil and commercial partners. People are trained to be solution-oriented, and civil society organisations are encouraged to present ideas and solutions to problems they identify.

"Many people are raising their hands to help us capacitate local government, with the National Business Initiative and minerals producer Exxaro providing training and mentoring, and having appointed experts to mentor municipal officials in areas that they operate.

"Further, United Nations agencies have also come on board and are helping us to build results-based processes and results-based monitoring systems. Tertiary education institutions are helping us to collate and analyse information so that we can perform better planning in municipalities in the Waterberg," added Raputsoa.

The DDM must move beyond coordination of government spheres to collaboration with stakeholders, as well as optimising information and communications technologies and investing in appropriate tools to support effective planning. Further, there must be sustained investment into the capacity of all officials, linked to ensuring that they perform their tasks as they should.

"We believe that, with all these elements, we will be able to effect a bold and resilient transformation of municipal leadership to where local governments can serve people effectively and efficiently," said Raputsoa.