ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula has admitted his organisation is partly to blame for the deep-seated rot in local government, saying the unqualified people it deployed to run municipalities often ended up dabbling in fraud and corruption.

A Business Day report notes of the 257 municipalities in the country, 123 have cases of corruption being investigated by the Hawks.

Delivering the keynote address at the ANC’s local government intervention workshop in Boksburg yesterday, Mbalula said despite his party’s ‘achievements’ of the past three decades, local government was in a severely weakened state.

‘Many municipalities are struggling to provide the very basic of services to their residents, few are able to perform the transformational function that the people expect of them,’ he said.

Mbalula said the rot in local government is not only an indictment of the leadership of the affected municipalities but ‘it is also an indictment on the ANC’.

‘Even where we are not in charge, in Johannesburg, people still look up to the ANC. We are not in charge in Pretoria, but people still blame the ANC. It is the DA that is in charge. We have lost power in the last eight years or so in Pretoria. If there is a problem of water and cholera, they blame it on the ANC,’ Mbalula said.

He said financial challenges in the municipalities are part of a ‘far broader crisis of governance, operational performance and legitimacy. Many of these challenges arise from poor management of the political administrative interface. There is weak oversight, poor accountability and inadequate consequence management systems.

‘We take time to take decisions even where we see that issues are very clear and people are just undermining governance. In Mangaung, it took us, I don’t know how long, where people went to council, and undermined the ANC’s mandate. Only this year we took decisive action, we expelled them ... We must not be afraid to take decisive action where we are undermined,’ said Mbalula.

Another problem was the employment of unqualified people in critical positions.

‘It’s a problem for us, we employ people without qualifications. We put them there,’ he said.

Full Business Day report