Laws proposed to crack down on municipalities

Proposed laws that aim to ensure municipalities employ only skilled people, will be presented to the Cabinet in March, Co-operative Governance Minister Sicelo Shiceka said on Wednesday.

"If a council employs unskilled people, what will happen is that the MEC must intervene within a prescribed period," Shiceka said of the proposed amendments to the Municipal Systems Act.

"If the MEC does not intervene then the national minister must intervene in a prescribed period to reverse that.

"We want to ensure there is stability in that cadre of leadership in the municipality."

Municipalities would have to report suspensions or firings to the province, which in turn had to report to the national government.

"You must write it down and explain the reasons why things happen," Shiceka said.

"We believe that if we do those things we will be able to move forward."

Shiceka said Cosatu had been "a bit unhappy" about one of the laws that proposed to ban municipal managers" from being the office bearers of political parties.

"Cosatu is unhappy because they feel this thing is going to be abused and it will ban employees in municipalities from being part of political parties as activists.

"We are dealing with leadership of municipalities at a management level. They must not be office bearers. We are not saying they must not be part of executive committees of political parties... We are saying they must not be office bearers, which includes chairmen, deputy chairmen and treasurers."

Another issue the bill aims to deal with is speeding up disciplinary processes in municipalities.

"We want it to be snappy, to be quick," Shiceka said.

Sapa

Posted at 09:05AM Mar 04, 2010 by Editor in Residential  |  Comments[3]