The Midvaal municipal offices in Meyerton aren’t flashy — but they’re neat, and they’re surrounded by an invitingly green, well-kept lawn and garden. In part, that’s due to the efforts of Solly Mosidi, acting municipal manager of the DA-governed Gauteng municipality.
"The first impression you get when you go to the municipal buildings is important," says Mosidi, who’s worked in the municipal administration for nine years, the past three as acting manager. But it’s not just about aesthetics. "If the municipality cannot take care of its main surroundings, how will it be able to take care of the rest of the municipality?" he asks.
With seven years of clean audit reports to its name, Midvaal is among the top local councils in SA. It’s the only Gauteng municipality with such a track record, and it’s often rolled out by the DA as an example of what the party can achieve in government.
Auditor-general (AG) Tsakani Maluleke, too, has pointed to the municipality’s success, noting in her 2019/2020 report on local government: "The political and administrative leadership work well together and have a culture of high performance."
But Mosidi is quick to note the need for "segregation" between the administrative apparatus of government and the politics of it all. When quizzed by the FM about what it takes to run a successful municipality, he says municipal managers and mayors shouldn’t be good friends.
He points out how it’s often the case, in instances of municipal corruption, that the mayor, municipal manager and CFO are all charged together. It’s a sign of how systems fail if those in management positions don’t respect the boundaries, he says.
"If the mayor puts pressure on you to do a certain thing, you must say: ‘No — I will report to you on a monthly basis,’" Mosidi explains. "Once there is no friction about territory, then the municipality moves properly."
He’s also clear that politics has no place in recruitment for administrative positions at the municipality. "Here we look at experience and competence for the job," he says.
The separation of the political and administrative realms extends to dress code in Midvaal, where municipal employees are not allowed to wear party or union regalia to work. "We buy people [personal protective equipment]," Mosidi says. "We will charge you for coming to work with the wrong uniform, and we don’t pay for your injuries if you don’t wear the proper thing."
But while municipal officials must, in Mosidi’s view, keep their politics personal, that doesn’t mean politics doesn’t feature prominently at local government level. After all, the party in power must deliver on its manifesto, and it’s up to the public servants in the administration to carry out that work. "We look at the manifesto and we align our work with it," he says.
Outside the politics-administration balance, Mosidi believes Midvaal’s success lies in its clear lines of communication with the town’s residents. "We have an active community," he says. "They complain. If a tree falls somewhere, they are the first to phone us."
There is also an app for residents to report issues such as potholes, and the municipality gives a turnaround time in which it will address the problem.
"One [piece of] advice we gave to our politicians is to underpromise and overdeliver," he says. And to consult the community when there is a limited budget for a project, such as fixing the roads, to ensure there’s buy-in.
"We ask the community to decide what road to do first, given our guidelines," he says. "To those who we are not able to provide a service now, we tell them their time is coming."
To keep communication channels open, councillors have regular meetings with ward committees, irrespective of party affiliation. There is also transparency about how budgets are allocated and about the municipality’s priorities, Mosidi says, especially as the budget isn’t always big enough to meet all the needs of the community.
On the financial side, salaries are kept within scale. As a more modest municipality, Midvaal can’t compete on salary with the big metros — but it can offer potential staff the promise of experience, where officials get to multitask and are "able to do different things". It’s meant the municipality has been able to attract a team that is "competent and qualified", he says.
Efficiency is also guaranteed by the municipality’s payment structure. Suppliers are paid daily, not monthly, so it becomes more difficult for anyone to game the system. And the community reports back when a contractor doesn’t finish their work.
"That way you can see if there is collusion, and you can give the contractor’s name to the Treasury to blacklist [them]," he says.
With just over 92%, the municipality has a solid rate-collection record. And while residents’ utilities are consistently cut off if they haven’t paid by the seventh of the month, there are also checks in place to ensure relief can be provided to poorer residents who meet the necessary criteria.
About 600km south, where the rural Eastern Cape borders Lesotho, there’s another corner of excellence in a municipal landscape characterised by failure.
Municipal manager Mxolisi Yawa has been with the ANC-led Senqu local municipality for two decades.
Like Midvaal, Senqu is one of few municipalities in SA to receive regular clean audits. Or, at least, it has for the past seven years. But in the year Yawa first joined, the municipality received a disclaimed opinion from the AG, an indication it had provided insufficient evidence for the authority to issue an audit report at all.
What sets Senqu apart, Yawa believes, is that its administrators have actually learnt from their mistakes — an anomaly in local government, if you consider the annual AG report.
"Every time there is an audit report and letter on the table, I’d go on a retreat with my management team, and where the AG made a finding, we made improvements," Yawa says. "I had a good team of experienced managers and we attended sessions organised by government and Salga [the SA Local Government Association] where we [were] peer-reviewed."
For Yawa, the external signs of a well-run municipality include clean sidewalks, streets without potholes, taps with running water and working streetlights. "When robots aren’t working, and it’s a dark city, that communicates a message about systems, about the financial viability of the municipality, and whether resources of the people are well-used," he says.
But things aren’t always easy. More than 60% of Senqu’s 140,000-odd residents depend on social grants, and the Covid restrictions on movement and tourism have left many a small business suffering. It’s meant many residents have been unable to pay their municipal bills, and the collection rate has fallen to 70%.
"One thing we do is identify people who are indigent and we accommodate them in terms of support," says Yawa. There are also incentive schemes, through which interest payments can be waived for those who are able to pay for current services but who have fallen into arrears.
Among Yawa’s concerns is that municipal managers now have to reapply for their jobs every five years — something he fears could lead to instability and a loss of institutional memory. It could also make managers more pliable, if they feel they need to please their political bosses to have their contracts renewed.
"If I have security of tenure, I can put my foot down on issues," he says.
With his own contract coming to an end next year, Yawa is uncertain about the future. But he’s grateful for the rich experience two decades on the job have given him.
"I know what this municipality lacks, and I know the strong points," he says. "I’ve introduced control systems to ensure that we mitigate against such faults. We have created a fairly viable municipality that can pay creditors and that can pay its dues."
Yawa, together with two other officials, was convicted of violating the Municipal Finance Management Act in 2017. However, his lawyer tells the FM that the conviction was overturned two years later on appeal in the Grahamstown (now Makhanda) high court on the grounds that it was a malicious prosecution
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