The language of management has infused our public life. Even in universities, which are supposed to be if not ivory towers at least places where the profit motive is kept at bay, the dread acronym KPI can be heard.
The language of management has infused our public life. Even in universities, which are supposed to be if not ivory towers at least places where the profit motive is kept at bay, the dread acronym KPI can be heard.
It stands for Key Performance Indicator, and is a “metric” to measure how well or badly people are doing their jobs.
In many areas of life it is hard to apply a numerical measure of doing things well or poorly. Should a university be judged on how many students it graduates, for example, even if those graduates do not have the imagination or self-knowledge to deal with what life throws at them?
Of course not.
The idea of quality in education and elsewhere cannot be magicked into number crunching.
“Accountability,” a buzzword of politics, takes its name from accounting, in which we place too much trust, as if the accounting exercise were more real than other reports. This is not to say that measurement does not have its place. It's a question of judgement and moderation.
Former taxman and Finance Minister, Pravin Gordhan, admitted recently that the rules on financial reporting are too onerous and complicated for small municipalities. Gordhan was commenting against the backdrop of the auditor general's (AG) report on local government.
The AG found that only 22 municipalities out of 278 or 8% got 'clean audits', in other words the AG could be completely confident that the financial reports were trustworthy and accurate. According to the AG’s report, none of the Eastern Cape municipalities got clean audits, including Makana, and in some cases at least this must be because of the complexity of the reporting process.
The AG has noted that of the almost R12-billion declared “irregular” spending on goods and services, around R8-billion was actually accounted for. The reason for naming the spending irregular is that proper “supply chain” or procurement procedures were not adhered to.
I have looked at the supply chain management rules, and I think they are complex and ask a lot of municipal managers. The required steps to procure goods and services may not be appropriate for a small municipality.
Like most people who live here, I don’t care about how the municipality reports, just whether it gets things done. So it is not whether the AG gave the municipality a clean audit or not that is interesting.
The audit report itself contains the juicy bits. In Makana's case, the last AG report contains the usual litany of observations about inadequate reporting. It also notes that all the problems around the municipal manager and other staffing problems, including that there was an acting municipal manager and chief financial officer for more than six months.
More problematic was that money was borrowed for investment, which is not the job of a municipality. Worse than that, the AG’s report points out, “Capital assets were permanently disposed that were needed to provide the minimum level of basic municipal service, in contravention of section 14(1) of the Municipal Finance Management Act.”
Also, “Capital assets were permanently disposed without the approval of the council and the accounting officer, as required by section 14(2)(a) of the Municipal Finance Management Act and Municipal asset transfer regulation 5/8.”
Presumably this means that some thing or things that belonged to the municipality was sold without proper authorisation. This hints at a much bigger sin than not reporting properly, and we can only wonder what those capital assets were and where they went.
Simpler reporting requirements might allow really important lapses to be unveiled. Understandably, in the light of problems like water outages and the findings of AG reports, Rhodes University’s Public Service Accountability and Monitoring (PSAM) called on the provincial government to intervene in Makana Municipality.
In the course of writing about municipal finance in Makana sporadically over the last two years, however, I have become convinced there are no technical solutions to political problems. For example, that Amatola Water has taken over water supply in Makana did not prevent the recent water outage in Grahamstown.
The outages are the result of decades of under-investment.
This is not to campaign for any political party.
Local government should be about local issues, and it’s a pity that a party not aligned to national politics has not been successful in Makana.
In the meantime, we should look at who is best suited to represent the interests of all residents, whatever the party.
So let’s be sympathetic to the municipality’s problems. Let’s not assume innate incompetence, or let the curse of the apartheid legacy poison our debates.
Let’s also make sure that municipal officials do their job, efficiently and without corruption, and that the politicians elected to oversee those officials don’t keep their positions if things don’t change for the better.
