A government report shows that Makana Municipality is one of South Africa’s best performing municipalities in terms of service delivery.
A government report shows that Makana Municipality is one of South Africa’s best performing municipalities in terms of service delivery.
In an exclusive interview with Grocott’s Mail on Friday, Makana Municipal Manager Ntombi Baart said that according to an assessment conducted by the national department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs the municipality is one out of 56 best performing municipalities in South Africa. The assessment report was revealed by the department’s minister Sicelo Shiceka at a recent national indaba for local government in Cape Town.
Makana is one of seven best performing municipalities in the Eastern Cape and Baart attributes this to her ability to "stabilise" the municipality. She said this gives her hope for a clean audit for the past financial year which ended in June. During the department’s investigation the officials had noticed a great improvement since their last visit.
However, Baart took up her post in September last year so she was not involved in the municipality for the entire 2008/2009 financial year. When she joined the municipality there was no performance management system in place so she managed to introduce and implement the system on senior management level. The lack of such a system resulted in an unstable environment within the municipality’s administrative procedures and processes which she had to address.
Baart wants the municipality’s performance management system to be improved so that all employees are held accountable for their actions, including those who fall under the lower employment grades."There are drastic steps to cascade the performance management system up to assistant director level as well as all employees, so we have a target for this financial year to ensure that up to assistant director level there’s implementation of the performance mangement system," said Baart.
"My focus really has been on the basic issues like document management," she explained, "because when I arrived here there was no culture of memo writing which is critical in terms of administration because whatever you do, you do through a piece of paper, if you don’t have that paper you cannot have evidence of what you have done." She added that it was "not easy" for her to introduce stability in the municipality as her colleagues were not used to keeping records of their transactions.
She said she has been holding regular senior management team meetings where she meets with directors and managers on a fortnightly basis to discuss their progress so that they can have a "common understanding" of issues. She also said that departmental reports are first tabled at these meetings before they are included in council meetings.
During a recent visit by an official from the Auditor-General’s (AG) office herself and Makana Mayor Vumile Lwana signed declarations that committed them to an unqualified, clean audit for the next financial year.
For the 2007/2008 financial year Makana Municipality received an adverse audit opinion from the AG which means that there are some areas that require attention. Regarding water restrictions and problems in Makana, Baart said the municipality’s water services manager Martha Letsoalo has resigned and that her resignation came at a time when Letsaolo’s competence was being questioned and that she had discussed this with the mayor. Baart says she doesn’t know how she got the job in the first place and that when Letsoalo’s probation had passed she would not have signed a confirmation of employment.
"She was not vigilant enough in terms of developing a masterplan and taking proper actions to avoid water outages," she explained. She emphasised that Letsoalo will be replaced with a "competent" person.
In the near future, the municipality is planning to appoint a full time arts and culture officer in the next financial year, as of 1 July 2010. The officer will be responsible for, among other things, ensuring that arts development and promotion projects are included in the municipality’s Integrated Development Plan (IDP).
In line with the establishment of the national youth development agency the municipality has budgeted R250 000 to establish a youth desk which will perform the work currently done by the Youth Advisory Centre (which is currently attempting to help the youth with business and bursary-related issues). Baart says this move is sure to enhance the effectiveness of the centre and will kickstart a range of positive spinoffs.
