Hon House Chair, the example of some of the things that have been referred to here has to do with the Buffalo City Municipality where, within this period of democracy in our country, a fifth municipal manager has been appointed within the space of less than 15 years. You cannot have stability in that kind of situation.
The parachuting of cadres into top positions has led to grave concerns in public service delivery. For one thing, many of them did not have the right qualifications, or the necessary experience to enable them to manage. To make the situation even more untenable, those who entered the public service in the upper echelons sought to move on to greener pastures in a short space of time.
Career-pathing in the civil service is an essential requirement. Without it, young talent will not be drawn into the service. The move to create a unified public service will go a long way towards remedying this situation.
Instead of best practices, government adopted the worst practices and expected local government to function miraculously. Unfortunately, using political connections in place of qualifications and nepotism in place of knowledge have left local government in a dire situation.
In the rural areas the situation is worse as skilled personnel have neither facilities nor career prospects for them to be attracted to these areas. Unless public servants are suitably incentivised, they will give rural districts a wide berth. These disadvantaged areas will therefore remain seriously disadvantaged for a long time. Rural municipalities are the institutions that are suffering the most. They are the municipalities that receive the least amount of money because of their surrounding circumstances. Cope has consistently called for the professionalisation of the public service, because putting square pegs into round holes just cannot work.
Managing municipalities requires enormous skills. Reviving the principles of the Institute of Town Clerks and the Institute of Municipal Treasurers of a good code of conduct and minimum skills requirements were necessary. In fact, it was necessary to restore these codes of conduct.
Furthermore, an organisational structure must be built around the idea of making the public service an attractive area to draw skilled personnel: a system where qualified people would want to stay and work in their local municipalities because of the opportunities presented in a broader civil service that has to exist in those areas. Merit must be counterbalanced with the need to transform the public service.
A 2007 study found that a mere 1 400 civil engineers were left in local government; just three civil engineers for every 100 000 inhabitants, compared to 21 000 two decades earlier. One third of local authorities have no engineers at all. At present, just 7% of sewerage treatment plants meet international standards. On the financial side, qualified financial personnel or officers are in desperate demand, as are chartered accounts, statisticians, managers, forensic scientists and detectives. Transformation must rectify the apartheid legacy. Transformation must, at the same time, address the needs of the poor and the marginalised as it must address the needs for a transformed management. It must not only seek to address the one end of the problem to the exclusion of the other.
It is encouraging that 44% of university graduates are black. The problem, however, is that we do not have an adequate number of suitably qualified individuals to allow for an equitable appointment in terms of the totality of public sector vacancies. Our skills base must be further developed and empowered. Thank you, Chair. [Time expired.] [Applause.]