Pretoria - Public Protector Advocate Thuli Madonsela says her office will partner with state organs such as the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) to address backlogs that hinder service delivery in municipalities.
Madonsela said her office had identified municipalities as the biggest area of intervention.
"We want to focus on systemic interventions because poor service delivery on its own is just a symptom of a system failure. We want to attend to the bottlenecks in the systems that result in poor delivery of services," she said on Monday.
She said most of the complaints received by her office in the Northern Cape related to basic services provided at municipal level such as low cost housing and water.
While most state organs in the province co-operated with investigators, Madonsela said her office will arrange meetings with heads of institutions that were still problematic with the aim of ironing out challenges and enter into memorandums of understanding to enhance co-operations.
In the event of non co-operation, which remains one of the biggest challenges for her office, Madonsela said she would go the subpoena route.
"A subpoena is not a declaration of aggression but simply a constitutional mechanism given to us to deal with non-responding organs of state," she said, adding that the Public Protector, like courts, has the power to subpoena people to assist in the investigative processes.
