Passing the buck has all too often become a substitute for doing the job in South Africa's civil service, the left hand often not knowing what the right is doing.
Passing the buck has all too often become a substitute for doing the job in South Africa's civil service, the left hand often not knowing what the right is doing.
But, at least when it comes to service delivery in the Makana area, this could soon change, after councillors approved a mechanism for the different levels of government to talk to each other. The problem was highlighted recently when Minister of Human Settlements Tokyo Sexwale proudly handed over the first 500 of a planned 5000 houses to poor residents of Port Alfred.
His department then announced that the project couldn't continue because there wasn't enough water to supply that many houses. It turned out the municipality hadn't budgeted to provide the infrastructure, and plans for a new dam, or a desalination plant, were still nowhere near being implemented.
Hopefully that sort of calamity will be a thing of the past when the local forum for intergovernmental relations gets off the ground. According to this model, all government departments and other partners involved in development within the municipal boundary will talk to each other, to make sure they do their jobs in a coherent way.
Makana Municipal Manager, Ntombi Baart, explained to the municipality's own interdepartmental forum, the Integrated Development Plan, that national, provincial and local spheres of government were all represented in some way within the Makana area, and the plan was to get them talking – to each other, and the community.
Baart said the new forum would be the centre of coordination for development in Makana, with the aim of better planning and implementation of projects and programmes. She said the municipality was not responsible for service delivery areas such agriculture and housing, yet these were crucial to development within its area of operation.
"We, Makana, do not have the mandate for housing. We facilitate the building of housing together with Human Settlements. This is one department we will be working closely with," she said. The forum will comprise clusters, namely, economic growth and infrastructure, social needs, safety and security and good governance.
The respective municipal directors will lead discussions in each cluster. The provincial intergovernmental relations forum was launched by Eastern Cape Premier Noxolo Kiviet in 2009 in Grahamstown, a local IGR forum has been on the cards for Makana since then.
A report concerning the adoption of the policy was submitted to the mayoral committee in October last year and the policy was approved and adopted by at the ordinary council meeting last month. An official from South African Social Security Agency, Zolile Makile, said he was delighted that all local departments could now engage in one forum.
