Ramaphosa endorses DA on good governance

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The African National Congress (ANC) President Cyril Ramaphosa has told councillors during roll call engagement to learn and emulate the Democratic Alliance (DA) on good governance.

Ramaphosa kicked off the party’s local government campaign on Monday.

Addressing nearly 5,000 party councillors in a meeting at Nasrec, Johannesburg – Ramaphosa dropped a bombshell by endorsing the opposition.

The president conceded that this gathering of councillors, probably the largest meeting of public representatives the movement has ever had has been different.

Adding that they have agreed on action plan on local government plan that has six pillars co-service delivery commitments.

“Yesterday, I said to the NEC the issue of service – we have to do it and must approach it like the youth league was saying in their theme of the conference. They were saying economic transformation or death – and I say its service delivery improvement or death for us,” he boasted.

Ramaphosa stressed that things like water supply and leaks must be fixed and it is unacceptable that as councillors they can have sewerage running in the streets and not take any action.

He added; “That is a reality for all of us, and if that is the case for you personally as a leader, the same must apply to the people that you lead and that is being the servant of the people.

“That means that we respect our people and giving them dignity and recognition. If people do not have water, you must ask yourself why … there must be a clear plan that all of you as a council are dealing with.

“If pressure has to be put on anyone right even to the top, pressure must be put, because we cannot let or people struggling and suffering without anything being attended to.”

Ramaphosa advises Councillors to take a leaf

The Auditor General report 2023/2024 revealed that municipalities and municipal entities continue to experience challenges with financial viability, compliance with legislation and service delivery. 

Two municipalities and three municipal entities (21% of the auditees in the province) received clean audits in 2023-24, compared to two municipalities and one municipal entity (13%) in 2020-21, while six municipalities and 10 municipal entities (67%) received unqualified audit opinions with findings.

“Those municipalities that do best, are not ANC-controlled municipalities – and I can name it here because there’s nothing wrong with competition, they are often DA-controlled municipalities.

“We need to ask ourselves, what is it that they are doing – that is better than what we are doing.

“And there’s nothing wrong with us saying, we want to go and see what Cape Town is doing. We want to go and see, what Stellenbosch is doing.

“How do they craft everything, we need to be moving up the ladder of being good at what we do.

“We cannot forever stay at the bottom. It hurts me deeply when I continue to see that our municipalities sometimes turn to move even backwards,” he stated.

Ramaphosa encouraged the councillors to get further education and training so that they can become effective public officials.

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Meanwhile, ANC national chairperson Gwede Mantashe slammed party councillors, saying they are good at singing but have no capacity to manage municipalities.

“I know that we have a lot of singing councillors, but we have no councils. We all sing well, but capacity dololo”.

“That is the council we have. Comrades who are councillors, leaders of the ANC who make noise when a meeting is under way. What kind of leadership is that,” he asked.