Miyelani Holeni | Chief Adviser | Ntiyiso Consulting Group | mail me |
In the African National Congress (ANC)’s annual “January 8 statement”, President Cyril Ramaphosa again placed fixing local government at the top of government priorities. This emphasis is not new.
The president made the same point last year. He also referenced having said it before. The repetition matters. It signals that the challenge is no longer about intent. Instead, it is about execution and delivery in fixing local government.
From our work with more than 50 municipalities over two decades, one conclusion stands out. South Africa keeps trying to recover a system that never built capability in the first place. This reality continues to undermine efforts aimed at fixing local government.
There is no recovery without capability
Government often speaks about recovery and sustainability. These are valid objectives. However, they sit at the top of a hierarchy, not at the base. Without foundations, recovery efforts collapse.
We subscribe to the Resilience Strategy Hierarchy developed by Dr Louis van der Merwe. He outlined this framework in his book, Gauging the Resilience of City and Town Government: A Manual for Strategists. We also draw on lived experience from working in South African municipalities.
We have dealt directly with the precarious conditions inside them. The Resilience Strategy Hierarchy offers a practical framework. It outlines the conditions required for a municipality to stabilise, recover and then grow, in that sequence. The framework starts with capability assessment. This assessment tests whether a municipality can perform basic functions. It focuses on people, systems and controls available at that moment. This approach is fundamental to fixing local government.
What has worked for us is using capability assessments to strip away assumptions. We examine governance arrangements. We assess financial controls. In addition, we review service delivery systems and decision rights. Where capability is weak, recovery plans become premature. The same applies to sustainability targets. You cannot stabilise what does not function.
Only once capability exists can capacity be built. Only then can municipalities develop the intuition to anticipate risk. They can adapt to change. They can also recover from failure. Growth follows function. It never works the other way around. This sequencing matters when fixing local government.
What we repeatedly observe is misplaced expectations. Many municipalities are expected to recover from crises they were never equipped to manage. This is not a leadership failure alone. It is a systemic failure embedded in how local government is structured.
The three root causes
Our submission to the review of the 1998 White Paper on Local Government identified three fundamental root causes.
The first root cause is a lack of capability. Capability includes strategy, leadership and service delivery. Many municipalities lack all three. Integrated Development Plans are meant to outline financial and developmental strategies. They should support basic service provision. They should also guide infrastructure development, spatial planning and disaster management.
In practice, many municipalities treat these plans as compliance exercises. Leadership remains fragmented between political and administrative centres. Technical, financial, planning and economic skills are either absent, underdeveloped or thinly spread. This severely limits fixing local government.
The second root cause is institutional misalignment. Many municipalities are not structured to deliver the services they are mandated to provide. In some cases, municipalities serve populations three times larger than when their structures were approved. Yet they still operate with outdated models. Finance departments are sometimes staffed mainly by interns. Engineering units struggle to retain qualified professionals. Institutions remain frozen in the past while service demands escalate.
The third root cause relates to scale and economic viability. South Africa has too many municipalities with no viable economic base. These municipalities cannot sustain themselves. Despite this, they carry full political and administrative overheads. This structure fragments scarce skills. It also entrenches long-term dependence on intergovernmental transfers.
Confronting the root causes directly
As long as these issues persist, no number of speeches or policy reforms will fix local government. Fixing local government requires confronting these root causes directly. South Africa does not lack policy frameworks or strategies. It lacks implementation discipline. It also lacks the capability to “do the right things and do them the right way”.
Too often, local government reform becomes an academic exercise. Policymakers produce elegant models. Scholars debate theories. Meanwhile, conditions on the ground remain unchanged.
Practical experience delivers results. Progress has not come from another policy document. It has come from direct engagement in municipalities. We rebuild revenue systems. We restructure governance. More so, we fix operating models. We stabilise service delivery. We develop leaders who can execute. This hands-on work is essential to fixing local government.
This argument does not dismiss academia. Instead, it calls for balance. Everyone has a role to play. However, theory without application has not kept the lights on. It has not fixed water infrastructure. It has not restored public trust.
What we believe should be done – now
After 20 years of doing the unglamorous work of fixing failing systems across all nine provinces, we are clear on where change must begin.
Anyone serious about fixing local government must start at the bottom of the hierarchy:
- Capability assessment across strategy, leadership and service delivery.
- Institutional restructuring aligned to population size and economic realities.
- Capacity building in finance, engineering, planning and governance.
- Practical recovery plans with timelines, accountability and consequences.
These are not theoretical proposals. They are deployable interventions. They have been tried and tested in real municipal environments.
The government cannot do this alone
Local government will not be fixed by government talking to itself. Civil society has a role. Business has a role. Development finance institutions have a role. Practitioners with proven methods must form part of the solution for fixing local government.
Citizens already step in when the state fails. They direct traffic at broken lights. They organise water deliveries. Citizens protect infrastructure. That civic energy must be harnessed. It should flow into structured participation. It cannot remain limited to crisis response.
If reform is to survive political change, it must transcend party manifestos. It must become a shared national programme. That programme needs clear ownership and accountability.
The review of the White Paper on Local Government presents an opportunity to reset the system. If government continues to prioritise recovery without fixing capability, it will return next January with the same message.
Local government does not need more speeches. It needs fewer municipalities. It needs clearer powers. Local government also needs stronger institutions. Above all, it needs people who know how to execute. That work starts at the bottom of the hierarchy. Everything else is noise.
