Thank you, Chairperson. Colleagues, I think that if we were to be honest with each other in this House today, we would have to admit that the state of our municipalities is not what was expected a decade ago and that the hopes and expectations of millions of people have, in fact, been dashed.
It is also true, of course, that the state of local government in the country is uneven and the most serious situation pertains to the poor and largely rural municipalities, many of which are in a critical state and are, in fact, sometimes barely functional.
Now, the starting point in looking at this very poor state of affairs is the Constitution, or rather, the manner in which the provisions of the Constitution have been inadequately implemented. I just want to highlight two pertinent issues here. There are many which the other speakers have referred to.
Firstly, the drafters of the Constitution placed an injunction on the national government, which is given the power to raise national taxes, to share the income so raised between the three spheres, including the respective municipalities, and I quote:
... to ensure that they are able to provide services and perform the functions assigned to them.
Now, unfortunately, notwithstanding the significant increases in disbursements from the national government - and I acknowledge that local government financing has never been adequate - there is absolutely no way that the financing of poor rural municipalities, even at today's levels, has ever been sufficient to address historic backlogs or current needs or, in fact, even to fulfil the developmental role they have been given.
Secondly, the drafters of the Constitution placed another injunction on government, both national and provincial, to support municipalities. Now, it was understood by all that the enormous delivery tasks facing municipalities required that everybody work together and that municipalities would need lots of support to make this happen. But instead of doing this, too many municipalities were thrown to the wolves and left, effectively, to their own devices to fend for themselves as best they could.
In desperation we had Project Consolidate, which was meant to have been a short-term measure, but has now become quasi-permanent. But at least it showed us what support means and what can be achieved. In our opinion, a lot more could have been done in the past in respect of years gone by, which would have made all the difference and this debate today would have been of a different tenor.
So where do we go from here? Well, I want to make just two points perhaps as a starting point. Firstly, we have a Constitution: Why don't we just implement it for a change? Secondly, if we really want to know what has gone wrong, I think we need to start by looking at the top rather than at the bottom. What's going wrong at the bottom is a consequence of what's gone wrong at the top.
Unfortunately, I feel that government's response to the problems has been inappropriate. The single Public Service story is just going to nationalise poor governance, and the notion of more intervention powers - which is now this constitutional amendment we'll be looking at - is completely unnecessary. Government has a whole armoury of intervention weaponry and it doesn't need more.
What we really expect is a mantra from the Minister and the Deputy Minister. Every day they should wake up and say: "More resources, more support, more resources, more support!" If you do those two things, we will see a difference. Thank you very much. [Applause.]