The repeal of the Remuneration of Town Clerks Act, Act 115 of 1984, and the implementation of the new system of local government in December 2000 meant that a new system came into effect that gave municipalities greater latitude on the appointment of municipal managers.
The new system did not, in fact, place a ceiling on the salaries of municipal managers, partly because it was understood that different councils or municipalities would have different budgets and would have different room to pay municipal managers.
It is also partly that we recognised that municipalities often have to compete with the private sector for those who carry the skills that municipalities require to play the role of municipal manager.
So we gave them some latitude through the national legislation to negotiate packages specific to their needs, depending on which municipality it was. In that regard, it has to be drawn to the attention of the House that with the new system the municipal managers could serve terms of up to five years, with renewable contracts. Again, because they were not permanently employed, it meant their packages had to be handled differently.
However, with our experience since 2000, we recognised that this was not working out. The Local Government: Municipal Systems Bill, passed by this very Parliament, is now the Local Government: Municipal Systems Act, Act 32 of 2000, which was promulgated. This provides for the Minister to regulate the basic conditions of remuneration applying to municipal managers, and that is what Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Cogta, is currently doing. In fact, within the next two weeks we hope to gazette the regulations that flow from this Act, and part of this will seek to address this very issue.
However, I must stress that there are constitutional and other legislative constraints on how far national legislation or regulations can go in this regard. So, we are bound by the constitutional constraints and I urge members to understand that it is not as if we can solve the problem overnight by means of regulations.