APPROPRIATION BILL
(Second
The
SPEAKER: We then proceed with
Motions. Motion 1 reads as follows:
That the Second Reading Debate on the
Appropriation Bill be continued.
The business before the House today is
the Debate on Vote 8: Local Government
and Housing. The hon
MEC, Mr Kotsoane.
Vote
8: Local Government and Housing – R131
971 000
Mr
I
We are assembled here today, hardly two
months away from the second national elections in our country, elections that
will mark a second term of office for a democratic Government and a conscious
departure by the majority of South Africans from our Apartheid past. We, as South Africans, will run towards
these elections with one view in mind, and one view only; to close the chapter
of our Apartheid past forever and to advance and develop our democracy as we
enter the new millennium.
We are indeed honoured to be part of
these exciting moments - moments, which bring us closer to the ideal of making
the next millennium an African millennium.
As we near the end of our first term of office, we are once again asked
to pause and reflect on the road we have traversed since the April 1994 breakthrough.
Our democracy, as enshrined in our
present Constitution, heralds an important feature of new management and
political responsibilities for our local governments. It marks the total departure of this
Government from the past apartheid approach which used local governments as
instruments of political control for purposes of engendering racial and
economic divisions within our communities.
Today, municipalities serve to
integrate our communities, to heal the impact of separate development and to
establish a uniform identity for our people.
It is this sphere of government that will enable our people to speak
with one voice one day and say: We are
Africans and so we will remain forever.
Chapter 3 of our Constitution (Act 108
of 1996) talks of co-operative governance and establishes Local Government as a
sphere of government in its own right.
Equally so, we acknowledge the centrality of this sphere of government
in the integration and co-ordination of service delivery to our people.
Every piece of legislation and policy
has therefore, been directed towards establishing a representative, accountable
and community-driven local government.
Both in terms of its internal management and development plans, local
governments are required by statute to ensure that their programmes reflect the
aspirations and ideals of their respective constituencies.
The fact that local governments have
now submitted their workplans for approval and pride themselves on the
readiness to engage their communities in development and management planning
bear witness to the fact that people have ultimately taken control of their own
lives.
This reminds me of four decades ago,
the most historic and biggest assembly in the history of
The
people shall govern.
I am making a case before this House
that the moment proclaimed by those who assembled at Kliptown has arrived. Our people will now be able to pronounce on
every aspect of their lives, decide on what they want today and tomorrow, given
all known and conceivable constraints.
We acknowledge that to be true to these
achievements, we will need to evaluate the conduct of the “new public
servant”. The “new public servant”
possesses new qualities. Qualities that are contained and described in the Batho Pele White Paper. The Paper requires a public servant that
values public inputs, to extend courtesy and respect to the public and engage
public resources in the most cost-effective way possible. This conduct in managing public affairs will
take us a step forward towards African renewal. We will have these public servants, who
pride themselves on Botho (Ubuntu)
and value our public, at a point where it matters most, viz. municipal
level.
Hon Members of the Legislature and
guests, this Government prides itself on numerous achievements regarding new
legislative and policy developments.
The ultimate effects of these policies and legislation will be to change
our lives and those of our communities beyond recall. The first and very important piece of
legislation is the Demarcation Act.
This Act will afford members of communities and their representatives
the opportunity to participate in the re-determination of municipal
boundaries. It will ensure that our
lowest tier of government is rationalised so as to become a “mean and lean”
local government body.
Resultant changes will be of a magnitude
that will affect the lives of millions of our people and will forever change
the face of this Province, as we know it today. I therefore wish to urge all municipalities,
political parties, communities, business, NGOs, CBOs, traditional leaders and individuals
to participate in this historic process.
To ensure and facilitate broad
participation, the Provincial Government has already put into motion a task
team comprising of provincial departments, organised local governments, unions,
experts in different fields and rural and district
councils to investigate and receive inputs to enable the province to provide a
representative position to the demarcation board.
The Municipal Structures Act provides a
management framework for local government structures. It has defined the role of public
representatives and that of public servants and the conduct of each in respect
of Local Government administration.
Structural relationships between
councilors and traditional leaders are determined. The historic tension between these two
institutions will be eliminated.
Alongside this Act is the proposed Municipal Systems Bill, which will
introduce, inter alia, a performance
management system for municipalities.
I hope that this Legislature will agree
with me that the changes will be for the good and will improve our knowledge of
municipalities, as we knew them in our past political lives.
We now have a White Paper on Disaster
Management. It is a policy document that
marks a serious departure from the past practice of “wait and see and perhaps
react” as well as the departure from a culture where government resources were
directed towards providing relief to a small segment of our society at the
expense of the majority. We are now able
to recognise that some approaches to development planning can increase our
vulnerability and risks towards disaster.
We will now be able to ensure that our
transportation systems, telecommunications, electricity and all forms of public
sector infrastructure networks are able to withstand expected natural, other
socio-economic and, sometimes, political threats. We recognise in the White Paper that this
approach to development acknowledges these services as a lifeline for our
communities. Hence disaster management
should be an integral part of any form of planning.
The Masakhane
Campaign has been successful in
mobilising our communities to be self-reliant and to acknowledge their civil
duties. The pinnacle of the campaign
last year was the visit by the hon President on
I am confident that Members of the
Legislature and the public will agree with me that transformation is a dynamic
and transversal programme of this Government.
It is a programme that will impact on general practices in public
service but will also change, in miraculous ways, the lives of our people. My Department is busy instituting a
transformation unit to complement and give focus to an ongoing process of human
resource development, business process re-engineering and re-orientation of
employees to public relations as required by the Batho Pele Campaign.
Integral to the latter will be the integration of conflict management as
a strategic objective and an instrument of management that will ultimately be
passed over to local governments in the Province. This will be complemented by initiatives of
the following organisations:
·
·
Centre for Conflict Management
Resolution; and
·
Centre for Conflict Resolution.
These organisations will provide an
institutional framework focussing primarily on conflict prevention and
resolution.
Hon Speaker, hon Members and the public
know that we have a number of institutionalised tensions in some of our
municipalities. Part of this tension is
political and part is structural. The
structural tension includes relationship problems between our traditional
leaders and transitional local rural councils. In due course, these problems will be
addressed through the mechanism I have spoken about.
Last year, I alluded to the fact that
planning in
Integral to this spatial and
development planning process is the provision of tenure security. Not so many years ago, our people were
condemned to permanent residence in so-called “homelands” and were defined as
“aliens” in the country of their birth.
They applied for and used lodging permits to stay in “white South
African areas”. My Department entered
into a R24 264m contract with the Department of Land Affairs to ensure that our
people receive tenure security. To give
life to this agreement, 24 264 new formalised sites will be created and
transferred to the beneficiaries. A
further 21 600 informal sites in Thaba Nchu will be formalised and transferred
to their rightful owners. Out of our own
budget, an initiative of 31 157 sites were created and transferred last year
alone. Forty-seven of these sites were
rezoned to business. At Makeleketla
(Winburg), 2335 sites are being converted to full ownership. Perhaps for the first time in their lives,
the recipients of these sites will receive a piece of land and a place they
will call “home”. They will never again
be under any threat of arbitrary eviction by anyone. Indeed, they will taste and feel that at
last, they too are free.
Housing development is also a means of
providing a home, a shelter and a right to a respectful life for the majority
of our people. This Provincial
Government set a target in 1994 of 69 000 homes or houses for this first term
of office. To date, the Department has
transferred a total number of 42 000 units, inclusive of newly constructed
houses and upgraded hostels. Still to be
completed before the end of this financial year, are:
·
A 1000 houses for rural housing in Qwaqwa;
·
A 1000 off-farm houses at
Bothaville; and
·
The 6000 institutional subsidies have
been approved for an experimental high-density project in
For the first time, this Department has
ensured the allocation of 500 subsidies to the aged and persons with
disabilities. Construction of houses has
already begun and the following towns have been identified:
Allanridge: 40 houses
Botshabelo: 40 houses
Edenburg: 40 houses
Ficksburg: 40 houses
Harrismith: 50 houses
Koppies: 40 houses
Reddersburg: 40 houses
Senekal: 40 houses
Steynsrus: 40 houses
Theunissen: 40 houses
I must also add that the identified
towns and beneficiaries are a result of collaboration between my Department and
that of Social Welfare.
There are other equally important
policy development and application initiatives that we will put in place to
ensure that the Provincial Government is able to deliver much faster in the
next financial year and term. This
Legislature will soon have to pass a Provincial Housing Act (currently a Bill)
that will enable the Provincial Government to enhance delivery through the
direct management of national housing funds.
Our current Land Administration Act will also enable us to ease the problems
of state land transfers so that housing delivery can be hastened in rural
areas.
Municipalities, as agents of housing
delivery, will also not avoid being under the microscope of this
Department. Housing officials and
councilors are presently enrolled at the University of the Orange Free State
(UOFS) for training on housing delivery.
Our ultimate target is to train 90 practitioners at this
University.
At the beginning of this financial
year, the hon Premier announced that functions related to traditional affairs
in the province will be handled by my Department. As a result, the Department has established a
directorate that will focus on this important function. We have since developed the capacity to
attend speedily to administrative matters of both the Provincial House of
Traditional Leaders and Tribal Councils.
In February this year, we hosted along
with the House of Traditional Leaders, a huge traditional feast where we
acknowledged the appointment of some leaders since 1994. Indeed the occasion was one of the most
spectacular moments of our Government this year. Currently a policy on the role of traditional
leaders is being researched and a white paper will be introduced soon. My Department, in consultation with the House
of Traditional Leaders, has suggested amendments to the current statutes and I
hope to introduce them to the Legislature this year.
Earlier, I spoke about a White Paper on
Disaster Management. However, I omitted
to acknowledge hazardous incidents that befell some of our communities in the
course of last year. One such incident
was the flow of
Winter veld-fires are often a yearly
occurrence and people affected are farmers and farmworker communities. With the advent of the El Niño phenomenon, most areas, especially the Northern and
The Y2K phenomenon poses a global
disaster, particularly for municipalities.
Being Y2K compliance means that an organisation’s computer systems,
including software, must be able to manage the date transition from
All local governments must, therefore,
ensure that their computer systems are Y2K complaint before the end of this
year.
May we briefly focus on the state of
local government finance, a subject that we normally discuss in this
Legislature? The situation has
necessitated the launching of Project Viability. The project aims to identify local
governments’ financial management problems, capacity and training needs and to
institute management support programmes where necessary. A process of training is now unfolding in
some municipalities to address identified needs. May I report briefly as follows:
Fourty eight management audits were
conducted and 31 management support programme were instituted.
Municipalities also experienced serious
problems with regard to both payment and management of their personnel. Although the Department assisted with the
resolution of this problem, in the next financial year, resource availability
will constitute a serious hindrance for my Department. However, a small portion will be made
available by the Department of Constitutional Development by means of a
transitional grant. I will therefore,
call on those affected municipalities to find time to focus on the solution of
these problems with their communities.
I avoided talking at length about the
state of local government finances, precisely because
a Report has already been submitted to the Legislature and I think hon Members
should have gone through it.
On infra-structural support: I wish to inform this Legislature that an
amount of R163 734 950,97 was committed to 125 infrastructure projects during
the 1998/99 financial year. Currently,
71 are about to be completed and 51 are completed. In the next financial year, 38 new CMIP
projects were identified by the Executive Council with a monetary value of R54
million.
With our capacity complemented by the
CSIR, we have successfully ensured a high quality of water supply, sanitation
plants and other natural water resources.
Budget
1999/2000
An amount of R131 971 000 is allocated
for the 1999/2000 financial year. This
includes an amount of R55 million for personnel expenditure of the former R293
towns.
Summary
of Programmes:
Programme
1: Support Services Sub-Directorate
An amount of R5 629 000 is allocated
for the overall management, human resource management and supporting services
function of the Department.
Programme
2: Technical Advisory Services
Sub-Directorate
An amount of R3 971 000 is allocated
for this Directorate to provide technical advice, assistance to TLCs and to
provide technical evaluation of housing applications and projects.
Programme
3: Spatial Planning Directorate
An amount of R12 049 000 is allocated
for the following functions:
1.
Advice and support to TLCs and
developers on matters pertaining to physical planning,
2.
Preparation of town planning schemes,
guide plans and regional development; and
3.
Formulation of LDO’s and IDP’s (R5 478
000).
Programme
4: Land Use Administration Directorate
An amount of R6 242 000 is allocated to
this programme for land use administration and the management of the Township
Board and Development Tribunal.
Programme
5: Housing Administration Directorate
An amount of R11 150 000 is allocated
to this programme to promote effective housing provision and to facilitate the
housing subsidy scheme. This includes
the management of the Housing Board.
Programme
6: Housing and Financing
This programme will be phased out in
the 1999/2000 financial year.
Programme
7: Urban and Rural Planning
This programme is only used with
respect to the personnel expenditure of the former R293 towns.
Programme
8: Local Government Finance
An amount of R10 548 000 is allocated
to this programme to facilitate and promote viable Local Government
infrastructure development.
Programme
9: Auxiliary and Associated Services
An amount of R11, 752 million is
provided for infrastructure projects that are contractually committed and which
will only be completed in the 1999/2000 financial year. The provision of fire brigade subsidies will
be part of equitable share allocation from 1999/2000. Therefore, we did not make provision for
that.
Programme
10: Local Government Administration
Directorate
An amount of R4, 918 million is
allocated to this programme in order to provide administrative and technical
support to TLCs.
Programme
11: Traditional Affairs and Community
specific services
An amount of R10,5 million is allocated
to this programme in order to render administrative support to the management
of traditional affairs and disaster management in the province. No provision is made in the budget for
standard emergencies and disaster management.
The Province will rely on the Disaster Relief Fund and the Presidential
Budget.
In conclusion, I want to thank my
colleagues in the Executive Council for their support and understanding of
issues of Local Government, hon Members of the Portfolio Committee on Local
Government, local authorities and hon councilors and my officials for their
selfless commitment to serving the community of the
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