The City of Joburg is in crisis. Mayor Dada Morero has now appointed a service delivery “bomb squad” to revitalise the city ahead of the G20 summit in November. Granted, Morero’s time in office has been short — he was elected to the post in August — but he has been woefully ineffective; the city has declined further.
It does not have to be this way.
Mnquma, a small municipality in the poverty-stricken Eastern Cape, provides a road map for all municipalities, large or small, to turn things around quickly and effectively. About 90km from East London, Mnquma encompasses about 3,270km², with a major urban centre at Gcuwa (Butterworth).
Change requires leadership, with political and administrative minds coming together to drive far-reaching reforms.
The FM first spoke to Mnquma city manager Silumko Mahlasela in 2023, after he was lauded by the auditor-general for a stunning turnaround in the municipality’s performance. Mnquma had received adverse audit opinions for two decades before Mahlasela took over. In just a year, he moved the opinion from a disclaimer to a clean audit.
Back then, Mahlasela had to work from scratch to put systems in place, from HR to finance, procurement and credit control. Since then, Mnquma has gone from strength to strength.
This week Mahlasela tells the FM that the focus of the municipality has now shifted to service delivery and economic development. This comes after extending and maintaining the municipality’s financial systems and processes.
“My strongest weapon is to put in place effective and efficient controls for good governance. Then we took a decision to maintain that stance, of course balancing it with service delivery. We are one of the few municipalities in the province that are able to produce a clean audit and at the same time focus on services and the basic needs of the people.”
The municipality keeps economic growth and development in mind. Its waste management policy includes setting up co-operatives drawn from local communities to ensure that the townships and urban areas are kept clean, with a special focus on Gcuwa.
“Co-operatives are part of our local economic development. They assist us in ensuring that we have a clean environment, and they create jobs,” he says.
A far-reaching credit control policy was put in place that yielded solid results in the early stages of implementation. It has now progressed to the next level. It is an aspect of the municipality’s work that is taken seriously.
Nonpayment for rates and services is a problem for many municipalities. For instance, Joburg is owed R38bn by residents in unpaid rates, taxes and utility charges.
For Mnquma, failure to collect payment marked an existential crisis. Mayor Tunyiswa Manxila-Nkamisa visits the areas worst affected by nonpayment, and accounts in detail what the council does with the money it collects.
We are one of the few municipalities in the province that are able to produce a clean audit and at the same time focus on services
— Silumko Mahlasela
“We go to communities and explain to them that, in terms of our data, they are 345 households and owe the municipality R12m. We tell them what we have collected so far, and what we have done with that money: we are now building a sports field in this area, we have constructed roads, or a park. If you pay, we tell residents, we can do much more, and we describe what we can do,” he says. The key is to deliver on those promises, so that residents feel the impact of their contributions.
Residents, he says, are more than willing to work with the municipality if they see physical evidence of what is being done. This strategy has been so effective that Mnquma now has enough cash reserves to build its own municipal offices, a first in the province since 1994. It has not relied on grants, donations or loans — it raised the R184m required to build the offices from its own revenues.
“A small municipality in the Eastern Cape is able to build offices out of its own collection. That is not something that any other municipality can do,” Mahlasela says.
It is hardly rocket science, he tells the FM — it simply requires determination, a healthy distance between politicians and officials, and above all deep levels of professionalism among administrators.
While Joburg’s budget and population are significantly larger, putting the basics in place — financial controls; getting the right people into key posts; a professional, apolitical administration; and a corruption-proof procurement policy — would set the city on the right footing.
Morero remains a deer in the headlights in his role in Joburg. Perhaps it’s time he took a trip to the Eastern Cape for some pointers.
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