Hon Chairperson of the NCOP, Mr Mninwa Mahlangu; Deputy Chair of the NCOP; His Excellency the President of the Republic, Baba Jacob Zuma; esteemed NCOP delegates that are here; the Premier of the Free State, Ace Magashule, and other premiers and hon members, let me start by saying that as the Gauteng province we acknowledge and welcome the invitation from the NCOP to make a statement, and also welcome and align ourselves with the address by the President of the Republic of South Africa.
One of the critical challenges we face is the delivery of quality services, and in this context we are talking of delivery on time and with the necessary speed to meet the expectations of our people. The scale and the enormity of the challenge are such that our people are impatient for effective service delivery. It is in this context that numerous groupings have come up to highlight the living conditions of our people and some of the protests that we are seeing should be seen.
It is also important that I indicate the fact that, as government, we have always been aware of the concerns of our people and the conditions in which they are living. In this regard, we have consistently crafted different approaches and tactics to address the hardships and suffering afflicting our people. Notwithstanding the fact that service delivery is taking place at a very high level that has never been seen in our country before, in my view it is not enough; and I think more can still be done.
However, the conditions that impact on the rich and the impact of service must actually be appreciated. In this context, I want to factor in the Gauteng province and I'm addressing the national executive here, Mr President, to say that the main issue of limited resources is the one that is going to give us problems. I'm quite aware that the Treasury and national executive committee are doing quite a lot in addressing what has come to be known as the equitable share.
Our province, as one knows, is a province of "amagoduka" [people who reside in rural areas but work in the urban areas]. I'm sure each one of us here knows a person who is staying in Gauteng. Therefore, we have the challenge of in-migration and that in-migration is going to result in poverty and cause limitations in so far as the issue of resources and service delivery is concerned. We want to raise that issue very sharply.
There are four issues that we want to raise: Firstly, we are conscious of the critical areas that require intervention in the three spheres of government. Now, we know that our greatest weakness, as government generally, across the system is the effective co-ordination of programmes amongst the three spheres of government. This has resulted in a situation where programmes are conceived, only to falter on implementation because delineation of roles and responsibilities is not clear and this results in poor delivery of programmes. This challenge of co-ordination sometimes leads to squabbles over who controls the budget for which programme. Unfortunately and cumulatively, this tends to compromise service delivery.
Secondly, the other challenges we have observed are poor planning and a lack of capacity. In many instances poor planning manifests itself in the duplication of projects, which results in resources being wasted across the three spheres of government. It also shows in situations where we plan and implement projects without encouraging the involvement of communities, resulting in projects being vandalised as an expression of rejection by communities. This reflects the problem of capacity within our Public Service, as well as a lack of commitment. That talks directly to the issue of diagnosing the real problems of our people and ensuring that we correctly, concretely and adequately pull out what the issues are.
Generally, the area of intergovernmental relations remains a challenge in our system of government. We need a proper framework and strategy that will promote closer working relations amongst the three spheres of government. In Gauteng we have gone a long way in working on that.
Notwithstanding the challenges that we have raised, in Gauteng we are working hard to strengthen the areas of weakness in this regard. The structures to promote co-ordination between municipalities and the provincial government are in place and are addressing these situations. We are now putting more emphasis on resources, particularly with regard to monitoring and evaluation. We understand that if we focus on this area it will be easy for us to detect problems in the system as early as possible. We are happy that the SA Local Government Association, Salga, is actually on board but I think it is something that is still a challenge; we have to work very hard on that.
We have also embarked on a drive to improve skills, particularly through training amongst employees, fill vacancies and also follow strict recruitment procedures, particularly with regard to searching for the best talent in the market. This is done in order to address the issue of capacity and competence in the workplace. Two issues that are very important in Gauteng - and I'm sure even in other provinces - are the issues of project management capacity skills within government and, most importantly, contract management, because very often our government is actually adversely affected by the manner in which our Public Service negotiates our contracts, as it were.
It is our belief that government can achieve more and deliver quality services if the three spheres of government work in sync with one another. There is no doubt that collaboration amongst the three spheres should be encouraged, and if we want to speed up delivery we should actually go in that direction. It is in this regard that, as Gauteng, we think that the platform of the NCOP will ensure the realisation of the objective of ensuring that there is co-operation amongst the municipalities. Thank you.