Cape Town – The Municipal Demarcation Board is considering 12 proposals to merge local municipalities in a bid to rationalise services and resources in local government, the board’s chairperson, Landiwe Mahlangu, said today.
Addressing the Cape Town Press Club, Mahlangu said these were among 202 boundary proposals that the board intended to release for public comment in September, with demarcations expected to be made in October.
He said the 12 merger proposals before the board included a proposal to merge Sasolburg and Parys, as well as merge of some smaller municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal.
He pointed out that KwaZulu-Natal had 60 municipalities, while Mpumalanga, a province of about the same geographic size, had just 25 municipalities.
The effect was that many of the municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal were not viable, because of their small size, Mahlangu said, adding that with scarce resources and skills, it was necessary to rationalise the number of municipalities.
Mahlangu also raised concern about provincial governments that had increased the number of councillors, as this placed a strain on quality and also risked making local government less stable.
The number of wards increased by 10% between 2006 and 2011 – to over 4 000 wards, with over 2 000 new councillors having been added during this period to bring the total number of councillors to 10 000.
He said in 2011 he had spoken to MECs to request them to limit the increase in the number of councillors, as this would also mean having to increase the number of wards.
Rapid urbanisation had also resulted in large population shifts and the board was looking at a proposal to turn Vanderbylpark into a metro.
Mahlangu said when the third board came into operation in 2009, it invited proposals from all South Africans on where they might want boundary changes and received 1 000 of them.
Of the 202 proposals that it is currently considering, many are minor changes such as where municipal boundaries cross soccer pitches or cut across one farmer’s land, rather than being aligned to a clearly identifiable natural or physical feature, like a road or river.
Included in the 1 000 initial proposals, the board had also received a number of applications from some towns – such as Sterkspruit and Flagstaff in the Eastern Cape – to secede from their present municipalities, and Mahlangu believed was a symptom of the failure of local government to deliver.
He stressed that in all merger proposals, community members were being consulted, through a Section 26 notice, where the public is given 30 days to comment.
During its first years, the board had collapsed 853 municipalities into 231 municipalities in 15 months.
He said despite these demarcations, there was still a need for the board as certain political compromises had to be taken into consideration when the initial demarcations were made.
Among its other responsibilities, the demarcation board also undertakes to review ward boundaries every five years to ensure that each ward has a more or less equal number of voters, particularly as inhabitants may have moved from one ward to another. – SAnews.gov.za
