President Cyril Ramaphosa launched the revised White Paper on Local Government on Thursday. It would require all water and electricity providers to hold a licence and ring-fence the income from selling the two services for maintenance.
Ramaphosa said municipalities owe Eskom more than R120 billion and that many are also in arrears to water boards. “Going forward, revenues from the sale of electricity and water will be ring-fenced and used to maintain infrastructure before anything else,” he said at the launch, according to the Presidency’s text of his address.
What the White Paper proposes
The President described five strands. The first reviews how powers are handed out and ties a municipality’s functions to its size, capability and performance. A function a council cannot perform would move elsewhere, often to regional provision or a concession, with constitutional and legislative amendments considered where needed.
The first strand also splits the service authority from the service provider and adds licensing for water and electricity providers. The second treats local government as one integrated system built around the District Development Model. The third covers municipal finances: tighter financial management, collecting more of what is billed, cutting losses and ring-fencing water and power revenue. The fourth is to professionalise administrations, and the fifth ties well-run municipalities to economic growth.
Successive administrations extended services, the President said. More than 90% of households have electricity and more than 87% have piped water, and municipal piped water now reaches just under 16 million households, up from 9.2 million in 2004. He also said two-thirds of households have flush toilets.
The 1998 framework gave municipalities powers that in some cases outran their capability and funding, he said, and politicised appointments opened the door to corruption.
The Minister’s view
Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa spoke at the launch in Boksburg. “The funding model, the one-size-fits-all, has shown it doesn’t work,” he said, as reported by SAnews. He said a metro and a small rural municipality cannot be given resources on the same basis.
Hlabisa said the policy moves from appointments based on career deployment towards merit, and that councillors must be able to provide oversight. “The White Paper can become a good document, but it can collect dust on the table or on the shelves if there is no implementation,” he said.
How it will be carried out
Cabinet has endorsed a phased rollout, Ramaphosa said. A temporary Local Government Transition Management Body will oversee it, led jointly by the Department of Cooperative Governance, the Presidency and National Treasury. One Local Government Transition Plan will list the changes, who is responsible and how progress is measured.
Hlabisa said the focus after the launch is a 90-day transition plan that identifies immediate priorities and sets up workstreams across government. It will also cover the induction of newly elected councillors, he said.
Related: unpaid pension contributions owed by nineteen municipalities and the IEC’s disinformation pact with four platforms before the vote.
South Africans vote in the local government elections on 4 November, and the newly elected councillors are to be inducted as part of the 90-day transition plan.
