OPINIONS & PERSPECTIVES: What Should The Litmus Test Be For Municipal Leadership?

In about 2 months’ time, South Africans will go to the polls for the seventh time to vote in 257 councils, in what would probably be the most contested municipal elections in the post-democratic era. Local government elections evoke strong emotions and are deeply personal to citizens, whether they vote or not, as they relate to everyone’s daily lived experiences, wherever we may be, whether poor or rich, living in Nkantolo or Vincent Heights.

Poor municipal road infrastructure, uncollected refuse, water leaks, a lack of job opportunities, and poor living conditions are issues that most people experience to varying degrees. It is not an exaggeration to say that all municipalities in South Africa face a mix of these issues daily.

The emergence of the new local government system in 2001 ushered in an age of hope for many, as the country moved from an exclusionary system that guaranteed good infrastructure and municipal services for a few and virtually no services for the majority. Twenty-five years on, despite some improvements in access to roads, water, sanitation, and electricity, we have also witnessed a deterioration in the quality of these services. It has become clear that there has been a decline in the political and administrative capacity to manage service delivery to communities in most municipalities.

Managing the different facets of local government, such as infrastructure development and maintenance, urban planning, disaster management, and local economic development, is a complex endeavour that requires leadership and technical skills.

This brings me to the current debate about the leadership quality required to extricate us from the challenges I have enumerated above, some of which, granted, were inherited from the previous dispensation. With each electoral term, the historical excuse loses its currency, and soon we will have to confront the structural and systemic challenges created by the post-democratic order, as well as our inability to resolve them. Annual reviews of the Auditor-General’s reports for the local government sphere bemoan the lack of leadership capacity, at all levels, to address poor service delivery.

The Demarcation Board used to produce Capacity Assessment reports that highlighted the institutional and systemic challenges facing municipalities in South Africa.

I am not sure what became of those reports. What is patently clear is that we have documented accounts of poor service delivery at the municipal level; what has been lacking is the willingness and intentionality to address them.

The ANC has introduced a requirement that, in its councillor selection process, a matriculation certificate is mandatory, while returning councillors are given 12 months to obtain the qualification. Given the complexity of the challenges and the reports I referred to earlier from the AG and the Demarcation Board, to what extent would a matric qualification shift the needle on service delivery in our municipalities? With all the challenges we face in our municipalities, is this not the opportune time to seek the best among us to lead and drive what I would now call transformation 2.0?

Being a councillor means being a leader in your community. A leader must possess the skills needed to lift their community out of poverty and crime and to attract social and economic investment to their ward and the broader municipality. This leader must be an all-rounder who can grapple comfortably with public policy, finance, budgeting, programme development, economic development, urban and rural development, project management, and other disciplines. We may not find these skills in one person, but I am almost sure that these skill sets can be found across all wards in South Africa.

South Africans have long looked to China as a model for socio-economic development. I have lost count of the study tours undertaken by South Africa's political and administrative leadership to China over the past fifteen years. Judging by the slow pace of improvement in key social and economic indicators, one can be forgiven for labelling these junkets as fruitless and wasteful expenditure. It seems we have not learnt from these pilgrimages that Chinese society also provides an important cultural context. Its long traditions emphasise education, disciplined effort, family responsibility, social order, and respect for learning and long-term advancement.

China’s developmental model has a strong societal orientation towards education, ethical leadership, respect for the rule of law, intergenerational advancement, and collective national progress. Combined with a state that consistently presents development as a long-term national project, this has helped create considerable social mobilisation around economic advancement.

Although I have never been to China, the key lesson from that country is not that South Africa should transplant its political system, but that developmental states are deliberate about the quality of those entrusted with leadership. If we are serious about transforming local government, a matric certificate cannot be the defining criterion; it can only be the starting point. Political parties should introduce rigorous competency assessments for councillor and mayoral candidates, testing their understanding of governance, public finance, planning, economic development, ethics and community leadership. Once elected, councillors should undergo structured professional development linked to measurable performance expectations.

Equally important, the political-administrative interface must be repaired by protecting the appointments of municipal managers and senior officials from patronage and by insisting on demonstrable technical competence. Municipal leadership should then be assessed publicly against a small set of outcomes that citizens understand: reliable water, functioning roads, clean communities, credible financial management, infrastructure maintenance and local economic development. Provincial and national government must move from repeatedly diagnosing municipal failure to intervening early, decisively and consistently when leadership and institutional capability collapse.

Transformation 2.0 must therefore begin with a simple proposition: if local government is where the state meets the citizen, we can no longer afford to send anything less than our best people to lead it.