Make municipalities work by appointing qualified staff — Cogta's Hlabisa

Daily Maverick

a day ago

The key to fixing South Africa's troubled municipalities is to appoint officials who are capable and know their job, says Cogta Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa, as public comment for the overhaul of local government gets into full swing.
It's been almost a year since Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) leader Velenkosini Hlabisa became Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta), and he says he is happy with pipelines being put in place to fix South Africa's crumbling local government.
Hlabisa spoke to Daily Maverick about local government, audits and the importance of political parties appointing capable people to lead municipalities, especially as the country headed towards the 2026 local government elections.
Hlabisa was appointed to the Cabinet by President Cyril Ramaphosa after his party joined the Government of National Unity (GNU).
His mandate, as explained to Daily Maverick earlier this year, was to fix local government, an arena that has been fraught with frustrated residents battling with limited water supply, crumbling infrastructure and coalition politics which hamper service delivery.
Among his responsibilities, Hlabisa is now tasked with local government overhaul via the review of the White Paper on Local Governance, which has been in effect since 1998. This includes looking at reviews of funding models and possible reconfigurations within the sphere.
Hlabisa said thus far, he was happy in terms of progress and projects in the pipeline. 'The turnaround plan is a focused process.'
The review was officially launched in May 2025 with public comment closing on 30 June. After this, a process begins of capturing responses and then working to create a new, or as Hlabisa puts it, 'reimagined' local government.
Thus far, there has been 'very high interest' from various sectors: business and ordinary people alike.
'You have an opportunity to say, how do we reimagine municipalities? Should we stay with 257 municipalities, some of which are not viable, or must we do a reconfiguration, but not a reconfiguration for the sake of reconfiguration, but a reconfiguration for municipalities that will be fit for purpose?
'I like the interest people have shown,' he said.
This is a time-bound project which intends to publish a revised White Paper by March 2026, according to the Cogta website dedicated to the task. There is also a deadline of July 2026 for a close-out report ahead of the scheduled municipal elections. Hlabisa said that by this time, the foundation would have been laid for what the next term of office could look like.
He described the review as a 'milestone' that would change the local government space – and local government is indeed in a difficult and shambolic space.
As Daily Maverick has reported, only 41 of 257 municipalities received a clean audit during the 2023-34 financial year. The City of Cape Town was alone among eight metros in receiving a clean audit. Coalition politics often makes headlines for causing disruption and affecting service delivery.
The process was going well as the 30 June deadline approached, said Hlabisa.
Within the next two weeks, Hlabisa and his department will host political parties and members of the House of Traditional Leaders for consultation on the review.
'This is an opportunity to reimagine, to shape once again municipalities that will be fit for purpose,' he said.
But will it really make a difference, after years of headlines about municipal dysfunction?
'The white paper review on local government is an overhaul process,' he explained. Some municipalities were unable to deliver services because 'they are not viable, they are not collecting any money from anybody, they adopt unfunded budgets because they don't have sufficient resources versus the needs of the community'.
'It is time that we must make municipalities work.'
The review will look at municipal structures themselves – their size, whether they are viable to perform or not, big or small. Then come the funding models.
'So we need to revisit the funding model. How much should be coming from the national government and provincial government,' he said.
Some municipalities had an advantage due to past history, so they would not need the kind of support disadvantaged municipalities needed, said Hlabisa.
'If you do not take into account all these factors, you will blame municipalities, saying they're not performing – how are they going to perform? If there is no revenue base … and the assumption that they will collect 90% is not working – how are they going to perform?
'That is why we say, let's go to the drawing board and come up with something based on experience – with functional municipalities, you don't need to spend more time reimagining them because you know they are fit for purpose,' he said.
'And we know municipalities that are completely dismal, and you need to focus on them to reshape them in terms of structure, and in terms of the funding model.'
Political parties – 'appoint capable people'
When Hlabisa meets political parties for the review, he will advise them to employ capable people, from senior administrative staff to local political leaders.
He said that municipalities, even if they had been reimagined and given more funding, would not change if 'you deliberately decide to deploy people who you know, people you can't take to Parliament – you want to keep them at a local government space because they don't have the capacity, but you expect them to do miracles'.
Throughout the interview, Hlabisa emphasised that credible and capable candidates had to be appointed in political roles, particularly within local government.
He told Daily Maverick that when it came to some audit disclaimers (the worst audit opinion), it boiled down to the capacity and capability of the people deployed there.
Fourteen municipalities countrywide received disclaimer audits, in 2023-2024, compared with 15 the previous year.
Hlabisa said that incapable mayors and council officials ran the risk of defying good advice and making poor decisions, 'which will lead the municipality to a disclaimer'.
'If you have a mayor and the speaker who know their jobs, they are the ones who say 'CFO, here are your targets – we want clean audits, accountability and transparency, you have all our support to achieve this.
'In that scenario, if both the political and administrative levels have capacity, no doubt you will have clean audits.'
Hlabisa said this was also true for coalitions: 'If you have capacity, you are able to pull the coalition government together. True, if you go to COJ (City of Johannesburg), we see a problem. I think it's the fifth mayor now, in four years.'
In comparison, he used the example of the uMhlathuze Local Municipality in KwaZulu-Natal, run by the IFP and the African National Congress.
'It has achieved a clean audit for three consecutive years now. It is under a coalition government… the leaders in the municipality are people with capacity and capability.'
Hlabisa said that at a municipal level, instability would affect service delivery if people were deployed who lacked sufficient capacity. This was why political parties needed to think hard about who they appointed to key positions.
Ward councillors were elected by community members, 'but a mayor, speaker, exco (executives) is a choice of the political party with the majority of votes', Hlabisa said. DM