Business and government focus on upskilling municipal workers to provide better service delivery to South African citizens

Training municipalities to manage their finances will bring better service delivery, said Minister of Higher Education and Training Blade Nzimande at the recent launch of a skills programme to upgrade financial skills at South African municipalities.

“Enhanced municipal service delivery, along with cleaner municipal administration... is perhaps ambitious, but critically necessary,” he said at the Johannesburg launch of the programme. “The expectations of communities have been raised by the state, but not always met.”

Financial management is a key skill in local government, but it has clearly not been up to standard, the minister added. “We are looking for ambassadors and change agents to turn this around.”

Government and business have come together with the launch of the R72-million public - private partnership programme designed to bring about minimum standards of competence for municipal financial staff.

It is envisaged that 60% of South Africa’s most resource-poor municipalities will have benefited by the time the programme is concluded at the end of this year.

The initiative aims to address the effect that the shortage of skilled financial staff has on municipalities. This shortage is evidenced by the fact that only seven of South Africa’s 237 municipalities received unqualified audit reports in terms of their financial management and reporting in the 2009/10 financial year.

The government’s Operation Clean Audit, which is meant to ensure municipalities attained clean audits; and the Treasury’s minimum standards of competence required by municipal finance staff, will become effective in financial year 2013/14.

The programme, funded by the Department of Higher Education and Training, is a joint initiative of the National Skills Fund, the Treasury, the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (Saica) and Deloitte. Its ultimate aim is to train 1 200 municipal staff who are involved with financial management.

Currently, the programme involves nine pilot municipalities in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and North West. It is due to be rolled out nationally this year, with more than 60% of municipalities participating.

Nzimande said the programme was “a critical initiative” that would help assist municipalities respond to the needs and challenges of social delivery. The ability of municipalities to attract and retain skilled financial resources was extremely limited due to scarce resources and opportunities, particularly in rural areas.

Treasury accountant-general Freeman Nomvalo said South Africa required an “efficient, effective and development-orientated public service”.

Accurate financial reports would serve as “sharp instruments” to plan better, track progress in service delivery and allow the government to intervene where necessary, he added.

Senior executive for professional development at Saica, Chantyl Mulder, said the programme would have clear deliverables, and the aim was that competencies gained would withstand quality assessment.

In an effort to enhance the skills of local government officials, banking group Absa has already assisted in the training of 720 municipal finance officials across the country – through the Municipal Finance Management Programme – over the past three years.

Part of this initiative resulted in the graduation of 213 municipal finance officials with a National Qualifications Framework Level 6 qualification in Municipal Finance Management at the annual conference of the Institute of Municipal Finance Officers held in Cape Town.

The programme, which is an initiative with selected partners, is aimed at improving the skills of municipal officials to ensure capacity is developed at local government level, to effectively enable the proper management of budgets and the efficient delivery of services.

Staff Reporter