Local Government Bill Undermines Accountability and Protects Irregular Appointments

OUTA wants mayors and councillors to pay the costs of unlawful municipal manager appointments and fruitless special meetings.

The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse’s local government Initiative, the Community Action Network (CAN), believes the proposed amendments to a slew of local government legislation will weaken accountability.

The Local Government: General Laws Amendment Bill 2024 introduces more than 25 amendments affecting three different acts impacting local government. They are the Municipal Systems Act, the Municipal Structures Act and the Municipal Property Rates Act.

Key changes include lengthening the period a municipal manager can remain in an acting position, allowing municipal managers appointed irregularly to remain in office for up to three months. This is a missed opportunity to implement greater accountability, consequence management and transparency.

According to Jonathan Erasmus, CAN’s Project Manager, negligent appointments and waste of ratepayer funds must stop, and the only way to curb these is by ensuring those responsible are held personally liable for such negligence.

“The eligibility criteria for a municipal manager are very clear and governed by law. However, the amendments put forward would effectively allow a municipal manager appointed irregularly to remain in office for nearly 90 days, which is equivalent to a full financial quarter in the municipal calendar.

“This move to allow what is essentially an illegal appointment to remain intact has massive trust and fiscal consequences for a municipality. If a municipal manager is appointed without complying with the necessary requirements, the municipality’s head of human resources department, the mayor and other councillors involved in the process must be personally liable for costs incurred,” says Erasmus.

Erasmus says a further amendment that would allow acting municipal managers to remain in office for six months, with an additional six months allowed thereafter, is equally troubling when the previous threshold was three months.

“The root cause of extended acting municipal manager roles is cadre deployment and political interference. Like any successful entity, there needs to be stability in leadership. Acting municipal managers cannot act as decisively as fully appointed municipal managers and, in practical terms, are likely more susceptible to political pressure due to their lack of authority within the organisation,” says Erasmus.

While the amendments formalise the structure of the calling of special meetings of council, they do not go far enough to regulate how often they are called nor place any requirement on being cost conscious.

“Special meetings, as in the case of the City of Johannesburg, cost more than R500 000 each. If three special meetings occur in a month, that far surpasses even the annual earnings of councillors in a year, and is 23 times more than the annual income of someone earning South Africa’s median salary of R5 417 a month. We need to rein in the spending on such events and encode it into legislation that those responsible for excessive spending can be held to account and liable,” says Erasmus.

Julius Kleynhans, OUTA’s Executive Manager for Local Government, adds that this broad-sweep amendment makes several reasonable changes, but should have been used to strengthen accountability.

“This is a missed opportunity. Every effort should have been made to raise the bar of excellence, not lower the threshold to accept incompetence. These bills are likely being written by legislators with self-interest and political expediency in mind, not the people,” says Kleynhans.