Madam Chair, the Local Government: Municipal Systems Bill is the third piece of legislation to give effect to the White Paper on Local Government, the first two being the Local Government: Municipal Demarcation Act and the Local Government: Municipal Structures Act. While the first two Acts deal with the institutional and jurisdictional aspects of the local government transformation process, the Local Government: Municipal Systems Bill seeks to establish the basic principles and mechanisms to give effect to our collective vision of development government through the notion of performance management. Its focus is therefore primarily on the internal system and administration of the municipalities.
This Bill has been drafted on the basis of a detailed investigation into the current capacity problems of local government, and the analysis of existing approaches and innovations to service delivery in local government. This Bill describes the core processes or elements that are essential to realising a truly developmental government system. These include performance management and reporting, resource allocation and organisational change.
This Bill is mandatory only to the extent that fundamental elements of public-sector reform, socioeconomic development, delivery of basic services and public reporting, and monitoring and accountability need to be applied uniformly on a countrywide basis. The system of uniformity on a countrywide basis with regard to performance management, amongst other things, will promote municipalities to operate within the framework which the Government draws up and will allow all citizens in our country to be treated in the same way.
There has been some contrary views by the opposition parties with regard to the performance management system. They allege that this system is like any other tool, and that the municipality may wish to use another tool. This Bill is trying to provide a uniform system so as to establish which municipalities are experiencing problems, and to offer help if the need arises.
The apartheid policies of forced removals and the Group Areas Act left a big scar in the way our towns are divided and unintegrated. Facilities were for many years provided in a way that disadvantaged black people in our townships and benefited whites in the suburbs. The Local Government: Municipal Structures Amendment Bill is going to change those environmental injustices of the past.
For instance, we have a huge dairy farm near Soweto. Senior citizens in my area always ask me questions about that dairy. They want to know who benefits from the milk that is produced at that dairy; they want to know who gets the milk; they want to know who feeds those fat cows - it is Soweto. The cows are in Soweto, but we do not get the milk. All that is going to change. We do not have a single dairy in Soweto. The people who have been, and still are, benefiting from that dairy are the whites in the white suburbs. This is going to change.
This system is to clarify the nature ... [Time expired.] [Applause.]