Chairperson, one of the most popular twentieth-century revolutionaries said he knew of no true revolutionary who was not inspired by love! [Laughter.] It was Che Guevara who said that.
Minister, I convey my respect to you and your deputy for coming back to local government in this Fourth Parliament. The President surely believes that you have unfinished business in this sector and must return to complete it.
As for hon Deputy Minister Yunus Carrim, we welcome him back after a detour into Sport and Recreation, Public Enterprises as well as Justice and Constitutional Development. I hope he brings agility and fitness from Sport and Recreation into this area for the tasks that we reckon he left unfinished in this area remain formidable to us.
It is absolutely clear that the continuity which this means in this sector is important. We raise it as a particular issue, for in our examination of what is happening inside municipalities across the country, but also in other spheres of government, the dynamics of continuity and change have the nasty habit of impacting on service delivery in ways that we may not have intended. Therefore, when the President takes a step such as this one and brings back persons who are known to have been in this sector before, he is teaching us by example. I hope we will do far more than perhaps we have done before to ensure this continuity.
The reconfiguration of this department and the redesign of its mandate are crucial, but given the pace at which this is happening, the committee reports that it was unable to engage as robustly as it would have liked to, in an engaging manner, and as we have been requested to do by the voters who this time gave us a mandate to do things differently.
We propose that the House accepts this Vote on condition that, as we have agreed with you and your department, Minister, we enter into a highly interactive, robust engagement to look at the work that is before us.
It is absolutely clear that the overwhelming majority of our people expect that the outcome of this Fourth Parliament will have a major impact on levels of poverty and inequality. There is no doubt that the fate of the young in our country, whose month this is, includes more than perhaps we have been able to give them so far.
We have no doubt that when the President decided to rename this portfolio "Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs", he was spot-on in diagnosing as a problem the lack of co-operation across this sphere.
An irate Free State commentator, reflecting on this matter of whether there has been co-operation among the three spheres or not, noticed that national and provincial departments tended to expect local government to co-operate, that they may not always have taken local government seriously and that this expressed itself in the junior officials they sent to integrated development planning sessions. These IDPs therefore could not always take important decisions, because those who were there were junior and did not have the authority to take the decisions. As a result, the IDPs did not have the credibility they ought to have had, also because of the inputs from national and provincial departments to provide the resources required to complement those from municipalities and the needs that were identified by the people themselves through democratic processes, as would have happened in those municipalities.
This is our assumption, that these IDPs would have been formed in this way. You and I know, sir, that we have been engaged in interacting with the Department of Provincial and Local Government over the past years to try to ensure the credibility of these IDPs. Now the changes that have been introduced by the President through the renaming of this department already tell us that he means - and I guess he was speaking eloquently on behalf of the ANC so - that we expect no less than absolute co-operation and collaboration across these three spheres.
As you eloquently said at the stakeholder workshop, when visitors come to any country and they find no water coming out of taps and the traffic lights do not work, they say, "All of government does not work". In this way you were saying to us that local government is crucial to the reputation of any country.
The accolades we have been getting today with regard to the success of the Confederations Cup to date are to a large extent thanks to perceptions by visitors to this country, foreign commentators, journalists and officials of Fifa of progress they are seeing, but also of the reception they are getting from South Africans across the board - citizens in these municipalities - and of the progress they see in terms of construction and development of overall infrastructure that is meant to make World Cup 2010 even more exciting than it is today. To me that is evidence of the progress that municipalities are making, amongst other key role-players.
Let me also just refer to the successful elections that were held recently, through which we came here. Very few people recognise the enormity of the input of municipalities in that process. Often we do not congratulate them for the resources they have provided and supervised, ensuring through their part and their responsibility that these elections are successful, as is required by law of all of us. When we compliment the IEC, observers and others, we often do not recognise the people who provided the infrastructure and the environment in which the elections were held. I think it is important for us to indicate this as a positive that has happened in this area.
However, we also know that in the third Parliament, in making an assessment of municipalities, the Auditor-General identified a number of inadequacies in their financial management systems. He spoke about the lack of adequate supporting documentation; high expenditure on consultant fees; ineffective internal audits and audit committees; problematic balance sheets and income statements where these existed; poor quality annual financial statements, despite their timeous submission; inadequate supervision and monitoring; inadequate focus on internal audits and audit committees; and gross noncompliance with legislation.
In an analysis of all material from municipalities, the Auditor-General said that they had identified six issues that should focus the work that we all do: supervision and monitoring; developing compliance with risk management and good internal control - good governance practices, as he calls it; availability of key officials during audits; timeliness of financial statements management; quality of financial statements and management information; and a clear train of supporting documentation, easily available and provided timeously. This is what the Auditor-General says. It is a key monitoring tool of the state system that is supposed to work with you in concert, in harmony, to bring about the sort of system of governance that we would like to see here. But this is local government.
Now, as the MEC from the Free State said, any failure that we perceive in local government is failure of provincial and national government as well. Section 154 requires of both spheres to provide legislative and other support to municipalities, so when municipalities are reflected as not performing so well, it is a reflection on the performance of these departments. It is not only perhaps a reflection on the current Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs or the department as it was called in the past, but also on other departments that equally play an important role in supporting municipalities to provide the kind of services and infrastructure that they are meant to provide.
So this idea that failure at municipal level is collective failure is an important one that the President was addressing when he renamed this department "Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs". So, in respect of collaboration across these three spheres and all public entities that have anything to do with municipalities and provincial government, as you correctly said, we are equally guilty, as Parliament, for having identified in the committee that we would undertake vigorous provincial support. We didn't do as we had promised, partly also - not to justify it - because of resource constraints.
Here is an interesting observation by the European Capacity-building Initiative, following intensive research around capacity-building initiatives. They say, and I quote:
In cases where public organisations have been captured for the narrow purposes of a powerful elite, they may have a formal faade with a mission, vision, outputs, plans, budgets, structures and systems, but the informal capacity behind the formal faade may serve totally different purposes and produce outputs that do not cope well with the formal purposes of the organisation.
As an irate fellow from the Free State whom I quoted earlier said, often the annual reports of municipalities are a work of fiction, partly because of what is concealed - what is not said. Behind the glossy stuff there is a lot that is not quite true.
This is an observation about systems of organisation elsewhere, but bearing some resemblance to the truth in some areas, though not the whole system. What we are suggesting to you, sir, is that it looks as if we have a joint responsibility to ensure that where we have situations, whether in municipal, provincial or national areas, where we find that there is capture by elites in a way that is problematic for the resources of these municipalities, we should act, and act vigorously, without fear or favour. We have a mandate from our electorate, the President himself and our manifesto to act against this business of corruption. It is not just that we want to combat it, but we have to undertake to dislodge these elites who are parasitic on the state system, including those in the private sector. So we must give notice that wherever they exist, wherever they operate, they will feel the heat of government, of Parliament, in how we deal with this business.
It is also fair to recognise that often our own views may not be accurate. We have a responsibility to be objective and to ensure that the assessment that we make of what is happening in these areas includes those key role- players. Co-operative governance operates successfully only on the basis of respect for the integrity of the institutions and organisations that are involved. They too have a responsibility and a mandate to undertake work. If we interact with them, as you have said, to produce harmony, it would be nice to have them coming along and co-operating willingly, so that they produce, enthusiastically, more than what is required to produce the harmony that we are talking about.
On that score we support you fully and we expect that in the coming months the intensity of our interaction will not lessen. We do this in the service of the poor and the working class who look up to us to soften the blows of the global crisis.
I thank you. [Applause.]