Pretoria - New local government councillors will have to hit the ground running as they prepare to take on the mammoth task of delivering services to South Africans, and improving the standard across the board.
The Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (CoGTA) has warned that there was no time for any individual to rest on their laurels, as much had to be done to build on past successes in terms of making services accessible to every person in the country.
"Following a highly successful local government election, the new councillors have come into a challenging local government environment with numerous backlogs and challenges, but one which is also marked by pockets of service delivery excellence as a result of various intervention programmes that government has embarked upon since 1994," said CoGTA on Thursday.
The department said statistics from the latest General Household Survey (released by Statistics South Africa in early May) show a solid improvement in the provision of sanitation, water and electricity by government, while also revealing the amount of work that new councillors still had to undertake as they settle into their new responsibilities.
Despite a range of challenges that include limited resources and capacity, municipalities have managed to ensure that 94 percent of households had access to running water by 2010; 80 percent of households had access to decent sanitation and 75 percent of households had access to electricity within the same period.
"These are all positive results of cooperative governance by national, provincial and local spheres of government with our communities, which our new councillors must build on to advance a more heightened delivery of services to our people," said acting CoGTA Minister Nathi Mthethwa.
A Councillor Induction Programme (CIP) -- which is aimed at ensuring that the newly elected councillors have a general understanding of their leadership role and legislation at local government -- has been developed through a partnership between the South African Local Government Association and CoGTA.
"The Induction Programme ... will be further supported with a continuous systematic training and capacity building programme to build a new cadre of councillor who is committed to delivering quality services, intolerant of corruption ... committed to the principles of Batho Pele (people first) and one who relentlessly pursues good governance, accountability, transparency and participatory democracy," said Mthethwa.
