Hon House Chair, Deputy Minister, the Back to Basics failed based on wrong assumptions. The assumption that is wrong is that to fix the administration in municipalities and local government would work. That is a wrong assumption but the reality is that municipalities are funded along racial lines and apartheid spatial planning with the assumption that they have the ability to collect the revenue.
The 9% that is allocated to municipalities is not sufficient for those municipalities. To make the Back to Basics work is to go and
do an assessment on the Back to Basics and come up with a different initiative. I cannot understand why in the municipalities we still outsource, cleaners and securities. Why all of the above services are not in sourced in the municipalities? We need to start there to fix the Back to Basics.
Make sure that all these senior managers who were implicated are in jail and we stop corruption. So, why are we not doing that as local government to fix these municipalities and go back to the Back to Basics? Thank you.
The DEPUTY MINISTER OF COOPERATIVE GOVERNANCE AND TRADITIONAL
AFFAIRS: Hon Chairperson, as indicated in my original reply I indicated that the Back to Basics is being implemented in all the provinces in our country to ensure that we meet the objectives. I think it is important to state here that in fact Back to Basics programme is premised on the White Paper on Local Government. It says that we must put people first and it cannot be wrong that we continue initiating efforts that ensure that people are put first; that we deliver services; we have good governance and sound financial management and that we have sound institutional and administrative capability. In that regard I think that it would be remise to suggest that in fact Back to Basics is not supporting
local governments to be able to do the things that I have just raised with regards to what it seeks to achieve.
As to the mechanisms of implementation and organisational design, that ultimately remains the prerogative of the individual municipalities as to the institutional mechanisms that they adopt in the implementation of the various services that they provide. Thank you very much.