Chairperson and colleagues, I think the country was caught napping last year. The ANC had a very successful election campaign, and they thought everything was hunky-dory. Suddenly they were met with lots of protests where people were very angry with them. That was a big shock. The ANC had to scramble to action. They sent delegations here, there and everywhere.
The Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Cogta, entity's offices in Pretoria sent all the senior managers out to see what was going on. I think some were belated, because it was only in September that Parliament decided to get into the action as well and establish that committee.
Today, a year later, we have the report of this committee and are asked to approve it. The real question is: Is that report of real value? Furthermore, is it worth the money, the very considerable resource spent in human and financial resources? The answer is an unequivocal, yes. Unfortunately, it is not quite that simple. There are a couple of sides to this story.
On the one hand, the document - which is very lengthy, with many chapters, as the Chair has said-enumerates a litany of problems in local government and municipalities, and makes a whole hosts of recommendations. Most of what we saw and heard was completely unacceptable. We all accepted that. Some of them were really terrible and shocking. It was necessary and we agree that it should be recorded.
My team leader was the hon Sizani. I think he did an excellent job. He was an excellent team leader and I would like to thank him for his position there. I must say that, if you regard the recommendations we made, most of them were fine and there were no problems.
We are hard-pressed to say that they should not be supported, because they are sensible, and speak to the issues. To that extent, I agree that the committee has served its purpose and all is hunky-dory. However, on the other hand, one should ask how much of what we have learnt was really new. Basically, everybody had a pretty good idea of what was going on.
How much of what we learnt was different to what the NCOP proceeds with every week; what the provincial legislatures deal with all the time; and the ruling party teams that were sent out saw? It was all the same thing. We just got more of it because we spent more time there. So, there was nothing particularly new or surprising. It was actually very good that we recorded it.
I have a couple of problems. Firstly, I think that, unfortunately, the committee failed to address the question it was tasked with. It was tasked with establishing the primary and secondary causes of the protests and to make recommendations. What it did was to put forth a 60-page long list of what went wrong, with recommendations. It did not explicitly say that the protests were caused by a, b, or c. That was sloppy and rigorous work by the committee. Nonetheless, the litany of ills, as they are recorded in the ANC municipalities, are now, by and large, very good.
I do not want to reject the recommendations, but I should say that several of them were problematic. There were certain recommendations made which inexplicably have not been included, despite the fact that we and the DA asked for them. The one which was mentioned now was that this House should establish a mechanism to make sure that the recommendations were followed up on then and there.
Why is that not in the report? It is an obvious thing. We visited two municipalities per province and a long list of problems and recommendations were made, but they are not in the report. Why not? So that was a weakness, and I really regret that it was not there.
Secondly, there were also other recommendations, for example, section 57, which deals with managers. It was problematic. We have a situation where the municipal system we had was the interface between the administration and the politicians, through the municipal manager and the mayor.
The report recommended that the section 57 managers should now report politically to councillors seated as portfolio heads. That was a very problematic issue. You are really twiddling the model in a way that is problematic. Depending on how it was implemented, it could cause a lot of trouble. We are not happy with that.
There was also a proposal for a local government service. I am not quite sure what a single local government service means, because the ANC always seems to be talking about a single public service for all three spheres. Now we have a single sphere for local government. Whatever it means, since it was not very clear, because it was very well scripted. It does intrude, if we implement it, upon the autonomy of the municipalities to deal with their own internal affairs, including staffing matters.
We do have problems, but having said that, we support the report and thank everybody for doing it. I thank you. [Applause.]