On the first day of the conference held in Johannesburg, on Wednesday, which was organized by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) and the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural Religious and Linguistic communities (CRL Rights Commission), revealed that the national government is working towards having a functional District Development Model (DDM) in hopes to address poor governance, corruption, working in silos and lack of skills within the local government.
The DDM is a district model implemented by government that represents relentless efforts to improve service delivery to poor and other vulnerable individuals in society.
The conference was held under the theme, “Local Government Accountability, Service Delivery and Human Rights”.
This comes after several protests of service delivery by multiple communities against municipalities and their underwhelming performance in providing services to communities.
The conference is aimed at coming up with solutions that are intended to serve communities, address and tackle the deteriorating state of service delivery within local government.
Pinky Kekana, the deputy minister in the presidency, said that the critical sphere of government was still crippled by challenges.
Highlighting and acknowledging that some municipalities are still faced with challenges when it comes to service delivery, she said that, “We have taken decisive steps to deal with these challenges and continue to work with communities to find solutions, in order for communities to meet their full potential “.
Kekana also noted that these challenges were often direct results of poor governance, blockages, corruption, poor Financial and planning amongst other things by municipalities.
Pinky said “through these DDMs we are fast tracking service delivery, doing away with a fragmented approach to development “.
The number of people needing service delivery from local municipalities is growing, therefore putting a strain on local government to perform and meet communities’ requests.
In her statement at the conference, Dr Patience Mbava , chairperson of the financial and fiscal commission ( FFC) said that it was commendable that the Public Audit Act has been amended to give the office of the Auditor- General some powers.
Dr Mbava further added that some of the new powers in the act left out MECs for cooperative governance and traditional affairs.
Dr Patience also emphasised that early monitoring by bodies and others could have prevented some of the acts of corruption and inefficiencies within the local government sphere.
