OUTA’s Community Action Network (CAN) wants mayors and councillors to pay the costs of unlawful municipal manager appointments and fruitless special meetings. However, 25 amendments to the Local Government: General Laws Amendment Bill 2024 may achieve the opposite.  

The Local Government: General Laws Amendment Bill 2024 proposes over 25 changes to three different acts: the Municipal Systems Act, the Municipal Structures Act, and the Municipal Property Rates Act. 

Key changes include lengthening the period a municipal manager can remain in an acting position to 90 days or a full financial quarter.  “Negligent appointments weaken accountability, enables municipal mismanagement, opens the door to political interference and undermines leadership stability,” says Jonathan Erasmus, CAN’s Project Manager.

Erasmus says the eligibility criteria for a municipal manager are very clear and governed by law. “The amendments allowing for an illegal appointment to remain intact have massive trust and fiscal consequences for a municipality. If a municipal manager is appointed without complying with the necessary requirements, the municipality’s head of human resources department, the mayor and other councillors involved in the process must be personally liable for costs incurred,” says Erasmus. “This is the only way to curb the waste of taxpayers’ funds.”  

Another amendment allowing acting municipal managers to remain in office for six months, with an additional six months allowed thereafter, is equally troubling. (Previously, the threshold was three months.)

“The root cause of extended acting municipal manager roles is cadre deployment and political interference. Like any successful entity, there needs to be stability in leadership. Acting municipal managers cannot act as decisively as fully appointed municipal managers and, in practical terms, are likely more susceptible to political pressure due to their lack of authority within the organisation,” says Erasmus.

While the amendments formalise how special council meetings are called, they do not go far enough to regulate how often they are called nor place any requirement on being cost conscious.

“Special meetings, as in the case of the City of Johannesburg, cost more than R500 000 each. If three special meetings occur in a month, that far surpasses the annual earnings of councillors in a year. It is 23 times more than the annual income of someone earning South Africa’s median salary of R5 417 a month. We need to rein in the spending on such events and encode it into legislation that those responsible for excessive spending can be held to account and liable,” says Erasmus.

Julius Kleynhans, OUTA’s Executive Manager for Local Government, adds that this broad-sweep amendment makes several reasonable changes, but should have been used to strengthen accountability.

“This is a missed opportunity. Every effort should have been made to raise the bar of excellence, not lower the threshold to accept incompetence. These bills are likely being written by legislators with self-interest and political expediency in mind, not the people,” says Kleynhans.

To find out more about the amendments, see here.

Read CAN's submission here.