Реклама. ООО «ЛитРес», ИНН: 7719571260.
Sethulego Matebesi
Civil strife against local governance
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However, this does not dent my conviction that the performance of some municipalities in South Africa is questionable. Objective indicators such as the Auditor-General of South Africa (a Chapter 9 institution that has a constitutional mandate to enable oversight, accountability and governance in the public sector) and the Municipal IQ (a specialized local government data and intelligence organization) reports contribute to this conviction. For instance, the report of the Auditor-General for the 2013-14 financial year took a decidedly more positive view of municipal financial audit results than previous audits. Still, only 40 of the 268 municipalities received financially unqualified audit opinions with no findings for the same financial year (Auditor-General of South Africa 2015). The Municipal IQ’s annual set of results for 2014 reveals that municipalities in the Western Cape and Gauteng provinces of South Africa typically remain the best managed and most competitive. The findings suggest, nevertheless, that there are still “too many cases of individual underperformance, typically in areas that are the most developmentally disadvantaged; namely, former homeland and rural areas” (Municipal IQ 2014).
Meanwhile, the outcome of the Local Government Elections of August 3, 2016 in South Africa (see Table 1) has ushered in a new political era in South Africa and, in particular in the metropolitan municipalities won by the Democratic Alliance with the support of other smaller opposition parties (Letsoalo 2016). The Democratic Alliance, which only controlled the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality, are now in control of four of the eight metropolitan municipalities. Given that five of the eight metropolitan municipalities (Cape Town, Ekurhuleni, eThekweni, Johannesburg, and Tshwane) accounted for half of all community protests between 2007 and 2014 (Municipal IQ 2014; Powell et al. 2015), issues relating to municipal service delivery and the administration of municipalities will be under the constant scrutiny of citizen in these metros. While it is too early to evaluate the impact of the coalition-led municipalities on service delivery and[13] governance, the possibilities that they open for local governance is monumental. It remains to be seen whether these municipalities will become more responsive and extend purview of democracy at local level, or become a space where the ostensibly ideological and doctrinal differences among the newly-found political allies take centre stage.
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