South Africa’s municipalities need skilled, competent staff and councillors to enable their turnaround, Minister of Cooperate Governance and Traditional Affairs Velenkosini Hlabisa said.

The minister, who carries political responsibility for the struggling local government system, was speaking to the Cape Town Press Club on Thursday.

He was especially scathing of the African National Congress’s policy of cadre deployment, through which it has placed party loyalists in non-partisan state offices.

“We are elevating this thing of cadre deployment,” he said. “We are flushing it down the toilet to just go away because cadre deployment, employing people on the basis of political association, is what has made our municipalities fail to perform.”

He said that infrastructure and systems could not function if the skills were not available and posts were assigned for reasons of political loyalty.

He added that cadres were not accountable to municipal systems, but to their political networks: “Sometimes you will find that a cadre is a leader outside. If you dismiss him, you will be accounting to him on the outside.”

He also said that councillors needed to be able to exercise their mandate. He said that they should at a minimum have a matric qualification, and those involved in finance matters needed an understanding of the subject.

“Every municipality must become more accountable to the communities it serves,” he said.

Turning to National Treasury’s recent shut-off of transfers to 69 municipalities over their poor financial management, Hlabisa expressed support. He said that this was Treasury’s prerogative to do.

However, he said that these failures are not confined to municipalities, and this should not be ignored.

"Municipalities are owed billions of rands by provincial governments and national departments,” he said, “And then we elevated [sic] that the enforcement that is done to municipalities must be equally done to provincial government and national departments."

Municipal government is constitutionally entrenched, and required to perform extensive developmental functions. It is also in charge of most infrastructure and services that maintain quality of life. The widespread failures in municipal governance has become one of the most important strategic issues confronting South Africa.