OPENING ADDRESS BY PREMIER T S P MAKWETLA AT THE SALGA PROVINCIAL MEMBERS' ASSEMBLY
12 MAY 2006, GREENWAY WOODS
Programme Director, Namane Masemola,
SALGA National Chairperson Mayor Amos Masondo and other members of your the National Executive here present,
SALGA Acting Provincial Chairperson and SALGA Mpumalanga Executive Members,
The Mayor of Mbombela, Hon Justice Nsibande,
District and local Mayors,
Honourable councilors,
Municipal managers and officials,
Distinguished guests.
Ladies and Gentlemen
It is once again an honour and an inspiration to have been invited to be part of the opening of your Annual Members' Assembly in our province Mpumalanga this year.
It behoves me, on behalf of our province, to take this opportunity to congratulate you all most heartily for having been elected by your respective municipalities to represent your communities in our local councils, for the next five years. You undoubtedly distinguished yourselves by succeeding to be endorsed in what was a fiercely contested election.
This is an eloquent statement of the confidence communities have in you, and we wish you all the success in your fresh duties.
Programme Director, let me proceed and immediately welcome to this forum our councillors from Bushbuckridge who are now part of the Mpumalanga local government movement. We are under no doubt that their participation as part of us, will go a long way in making us wise and enriching our collective experience.
We have observed before that the importance of local government derives largely from its position as the critical interface between the government service delivery system and the people. It is with this understanding of the importance of local government in mind that we have to tackle the challenge of halving poverty and unemployment by 2014.
It is for this reason that each and every ward councillor must be the custodian of all the critical information on economic activities, unemployment and poverty in their ward. In fact, a ward councillor needs to be familiar with the poverty profile of the families in their area. At least, he or she should know the most indigent families in their area and be certain that they are accessing social security grants. That is the most tangible form of public service.
Over and above familiarity with the poverty profile of their ward, each ward councillor needs to be familiar with new economic investment activities and trends as well as growth potential in their ward and municipality. It is only when such information is at our fingertips that we can influence council to develop informed strategic IDP's and LED's.
In the medium to long term our policies must create a change in the profile of our population, making more and more people employable and less dependent on government grants. It is in this area that councillors must wear the important hat of facilitators of economic growth. There is consensus in government and in the private sector that for us to undermine poverty and unemployment the way we wish to, our economy must average 6% growth between now and 2014. For councillors to be able to play the catalytic role towards economic growth, they need to appreciate all elements of their local economies.
It is not enough, though important, to simply be aware of the spatial disparities in economic development inherited from apartheid. There is no doubt that we inherited spatial disparities that created a disjuncture between the location of people and the location of economic activities. The area of Moloto, which supplies labour to economic activities in Tshwane, is the best indication of this disjuncture.
For us to exercise leadership however, we must also recognise that globally some form of spatial disparity in development is actually a norm. We must also recognise that development is a movement away from the rural economy to greater urbanisation. In fact in the case of our country, studies show that not only are the majority of poor people located in the high value generating urban areas, but the migration pattern is continuing in that direction from poor rural locations. In addition, most of the wealth of the country is produced in a small percentage of the country's area, where these poor are located. More specifically, 93% of the national economy is located on 30% of the land. It is no wonder that 79% of the population, including 70% of those living below the minimum living level, lives in this 30% where there is a perceived potential for livelihoods.
Our province is no exception. The majority of our population, including the majority of the poor, is located in areas of high economic activities such as Nelspruit and its' surroundings, the Witbank-Middleburg area and surroundings, and Secunda and surroundings. These realities of urbanisation and spatial economic disparities pose a real development dilemma. In our quest to facilitate economic growth we need to recognise that urban areas provide the greatest potential for growth while at the same time tackling rural poverty. It is a dilemma of balancing current considerations with future trends.
Where resources are limited, difficult choices and decisions have to be made, and that is the hallmark of leadership. Redirecting investments to poor areas with little potential for growth might not necessarily be the most effective way of spending limited resources. The realities of spatial development, including migration and urbanisation, suggest that expenditure in poor areas should be more of a social nature targeted at poverty alleviation rather than economic investment which has little potential for growth and labour absorption.
Colleagues and comrades, the reason why I am belabouring this matter, is simply because as we all know the challenge of local government during your term of office, is to be agents for economic development and growth.
To the extent that the quest for the six percent growth to halve poverty and unemployment is premised largely on infrastructure development, we must avoid the dissipation of our infrastructure spending efforts through scattered unfocussed spending. It has been stated before in various forums that greater impact will be achieved if a school is built in the same area where a road is being built and a clinic is planned for. We have a short space of time in which to ramp our economy to higher levels of growth. Our councillors must begin to play a more catalytic role in facilitating higher levels of growth. Unless we work smart to maximise the impact of our expenditure on infrastructure, even if our budgets were to be doubled we would see little impact.
Program Director, recently we accomplished a significant initiative in the history of government relations with business. We recently co-hosted a conference with NAFCOC aimed at addressing the many disappointments we have encountered as government with predominantly emerging business from whom we procure goods and services. The aim was to strengthen the partnership between government and business for efficient and effective service delivery. I am happy that a sizeable number of local government leadership and managers participated.
We believe that the challenges that the Loskop Conference addressed, permeate local government as well. This interaction with business proved valuable because it allowed government to look at the supply chain process and address the impact it has on service providers' ability to deliver what is expected of them. Business in turn articulated their challenges and flaws.
One of the key lessons from the conference has been the extent to which the supply chain system in government can either build or destroy small, medium and micro enterprises. In the process of procuring goods and services we have a responsibility to build growing sustainable businesses and not to ruin emerging businesses.
Further work on identified problem areas will be done in order to come up with new recommendations that all should adopt.
One of the challenges we are going to grapple with in the next five years is to achieve the alignment of development plans of all three spheres of government. National has promised us the requisite support in order to realise this critical imperative.
I wish to take advantage of the platform of this Members' Assembly of SALGA in the province once again to record our appreciation of the coordinating work your organisation is sponsoring to make our municipalities and councils function better.
This function is going to progressively increase if the face of our province is to transform evenly over the next five years.
Our programme for the next five years is unambiguous:- Electricity for All; Water and Sanitation for All. Our politics are about economic development, and the roll out of this infrastructure. We must become activists and self-made experts on this infrastructure roll-out.
I wish you some very fruitful deliberations and hope that you emerge from this conference with higher quality plans that will change the lives of our people.
I thank you!