Newsletter 55 – Strategic plan not so strategic – 22 January 2010
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The Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs published a strategic plan for municipalities for 2009 to 2014. According to the department, their ‘desire is to ensure that governance systems are streamlined and utilised as a vehicle to change people’s lives.’ This newsletter raises four issues with regard to this plan.
A five-year strategic plan for the country’s 283 municipalities was published by the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs in 2009. This plan seeks to address challenges of lack of co-ordination among the three spheres of government, inefficiencies with regard to the delivery of services, corruption, and underperformance, among other issues. The five strategic priorities been identified by the department are as follows:
· An efficient, effective, and responsive provincial and local government;
· an accountable and clean government;
· accelerated service delivery;
· enhanced involvement of traditional leadership; and
· improved partnerships, social cohesion, and community mobilisation.
The 74-page plan, of which the strategic objectives are a part, will not succeed without adequate means to implement, monitor, and evaluate.
The first concern regarding this plan is that it is only as good as the people who implement it. Unless the nepotism, corruption, and incompetence that exist in most municipalities are rooted out, the plan will not succeed.
The second challenge is how one government department in Pretoria will ensure that this plan is implemented at the nearly 300 diverse municipalities in South Africa.
A third problem is that the plan does not identify how service delivery will be accelerated.
The fourth concern is that government does not seem to understand what has been happening in communities. The final priority of the plan includes mobilising communities. But communities in South Africa have been mobilising themselves for more than 30 years. The hundreds of community protests targeted at municipalities are an example of how mobilised communities are.
In spite of these challenges, the department has shown that it has at least acknowledged some of the key problems at local government.
- Nthamaga Kgafela
by
nkgafela
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last modified
2010-01-27 07:44
