Government will later this month host the Local Government Summit in an effort to strengthen capacity for an ethical and developmental state.
This said the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (CoGTA), will be along the lines of resilient, sustainable, coherent, cohesive, integrated, non-sexist, vibrant and climate-smart communities.
The two-day Summit will run from 27 to 28 September 2022, under the theme – “DDM in Action – Towards an Ideal Municipality”.
It will be held at the Birchwood Conference Centre, in Boksburg, in Gauteng.
CoGTA spokesperson Lungi Mtshali said the summit will draw participation from multiple perspectives including senior government leaders across all spheres of government as well as legislatures.
“Most importantly, key stakeholder representatives from business, academia, traditional leaders, civil society, women, youth and persons with disabilities, to cite but a few,” he said.
He added that the summit aims to strengthen local government.
“The Constitution enjoins the three spheres of government to recognise their distinct mandates with due appreciation of their interdependencies and interrelatedness. The summit, therefore, aims to strengthen and support the local government as per section 154 of our Constitution. In terms of the act, the national government and provincial governments are obligated to support and strengthen municipalities to manage their own affairs and perform their functions.
“Our State of Local Government Report, amongst other matters, confirms the underlying root causes of the less ideal municipality and the shortcomings of cooperative governance that manifest at the coalface of government – in municipalities where communities experience government,” said Mtshali.
The summit comes in the wake of the recent promulgation of the Municipal Systems Amendment Act 2022, which signified an era of demonstrable interventions to strengthen municipalities to exercise their powers to the benefit of communities.
“The summit will serve as a coalescent platform to hone good practices for replication and an opportunity to find sustainable solutions to challenges facing local government and cooperative governance by extension.
“The summit will bring to the fore the importance of institutionalising the District Development Model (DDM) as an operating model for cooperative governance. Through the DDM, all spheres of government operate coherently guided by an integrated plan ‘One Plan’ in collaboration with social partners in every district and metro space to build inclusive local economies and improve the lives of citizens,” he said.
He added that key to the summit will be to emerge with a collective programme of action to enable an ideal municipality that strategically demonstrates the pursuit of a long-term development trajectory anchored on the transformational areas of the One Plan. These, he said, “pertain to governance and financial management as well as integrated service delivery to bolster economic positioning through infrastructure engineering and spatial restructuring”.