PHUTI MOSOMANE
SACP General Secretary Solly Mapaila, who addressed the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU) central executive committee (CEC) on Wednesday, said that local government has transformed into a breeding ground for ‘unscrupulous’ politicians and political gangsters.
Mapaila urged SAMWU and the SACP to work together in order to eliminate corruption in municipalities and enhance service delivery.
“We need to review the funding model for municipalities to be able to deliver services to residents. The current funding model deliberately sets up municipalities for failure, at the end of the day, there will be no municipality,” said Mapaila.
“The SACP will be happy to engage SAMWU on the challenges faced by municipalities and how these challenges can be resolved.”
Mapaila also attributed the delay in payments of municipal workers to the intensified effects of capitalism, as municipal functions are being increasingly privatized.
He argued that this has resulted in a lack of accountability and transparency, leading to the mismanagement of public resources and ultimately affecting the livelihoods of workers.
“We were promised many years ago that there shall be an end to loadshedding. These Ministers are still in government despite not delivering on the promise.
He said if the alliance was realigned, SAMWU would not be struggling with the MSA amendments which limit workers’ political rights while also undermining the alliance.
“The reconfiguration of the alliance was not started by the SACP, it’s a product of alliance partners themselves, all parties participated in the formulation of that document. It’s incorrect that SACP wants to liquidate the ANC, that assertion seeks to discredit the SACP,” he added.
Meanwhile, SAMWU) is expected to march to the offices of Gauteng Premier Panyza Lesufi and the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) to demand urgent interventions in municipalities and to address the rising cost of living.
SAMWU will submit a memorandum of demands, urging both SALGA and the government to address the numerous issues affecting workers and service delivery in local government.
One of the major concerns raised by the union is the cost-of-living crisis that has been aggravated by the government’s ongoing austerity measures, which have had a significant impact on municipal workers.
COSATU said the current economic trends have unleashed very harsh conditions for the working class.
“We support the call for the elimination of the low wage regime at the local government level, including the failure of the government to pay the Expanded Public and Community Works Programmers’ participants a National Minimum Wage,” said COSATU’s spokesperson Sizwe Pamla.
Pamla said COSATU supports the union’s demand for an urgent amendment of the unconstitutional Municipal Systems Amendment Act of 2022 that has introduced a new blanket ban on all 350 000 municipal employees from holding office at any level in a political party.
The original draft of the bill was only meant to apply this limitation of political association to municipal managers and the senior managers reporting directly to them before SALGA sneakily convinced an unsuspecting Parliament to extend it to include all municipal employees.
“This blanket prohibition is unconstitutional and violates the rights of all municipal employees. Thousands of municipal employees are now receiving letters from their managers warning them that unless they stand down from whichever position they may hold in their political party, they will be dismissed from their jobs,” Pamla said.
The trade union federation said the government has failed to come out with a turnaround strategy to revive about 90% of municipalities experiencing financial distress.
Pamla said local government is in real trouble with many rural municipalities no longer able to provide basic services and up to twenty-seven (27) municipalities in the Northern and Eastern Cape, North-West, and Free State, and more recently also Limpopo and Gauteng, are routinely failing to pay their employees.
COSATU said it fully supports the call by SAMWU for Treasury, COGTA and SALGA to intervene urgently, adding that a new funding model is needed to halt the rapid slide and collapse of local government.
The deterioration in basic services is causing many companies to close and send their employees to the unemployment queue.
Pamla said COSATU is also joining SAMWU in lamenting the chaotic state of political coalitions at a local government level that has created instability and undermined service delivery.
He said while these coalition agreements are perfectly permissible, it’s deeply worrying that many of them have been used for narrow political interests.
This has greatly undermined accountability and created instability that has compromised service delivery.
“Workers demand that these coalition partners base their coalition agreements on rational political behaviour and commitment to service delivery,” he said, adding that it is untenable that some of the big and strategic municipalities are collapsing, and they cannot take a long-term view regarding their work because of the failure of political leadership.
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