Accountability
Improving performance and accountability requires compliance, diligence to restore public confidence
HOW DO WE IMPROVE CONTROLS IN GOVERNMENT AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE?
Holding Municipalities Accountable and strengthening controls is the essence of good governance and administrative excellence at the local sphere of government is to ensure effective service delivery to communities.
“Lack of capacity” is one of the perennial explanations for shortcomings in municipal service delivery. Core to this capacity problem are the very high vacancy rates, officials employed in an acting capacity in local government, which are aggravated by the job losses of skilled personnel.
Skills, knowledge, competencies
Another issue that plagues the efficiency of an organisation is diligence and knowledge of the job. Employees skills, knowledge, competencies, qualifications and behaviour are severely lacking.
Continuous staff development, capacity building, and training is essential but this can not be done to the detriment of the administration being absent from work and attending courses.
It is essential that regular skills audits are conducted to determine areas where there may be excess capacity and shortfalls.
An employee who fails in the execution of their duty must be held accountable and suffer consequences should they break the rules, flout the law, or perform poorly. Those in leadership need to be constantly striving to improving key internal controls and addressing risk areas.
It is essential that government, local government, and municipalities hire the correct calibre of people for the job and fill key positions with competent people.
Poor performance
Key officials need to identify poor performance and transgressions and ensure that they respond immediately to mitigate damage that may be suffered by government, local government and municipalities.
What is glaringly obvious that many officials are ambivalent to introduce any control disciplines, enforce the rule of law, ensure compliance of daily rules of accounting, employ staff with appropriate skills, produce regular performance reports, and managing staff to improve efficiency.
Financial Control
There is an endemic issue facing government local government and municipalities irregular expenditure as a result of a significant breakdown in controls, entities entered into transactions that were not carried out in accordance with regulations and other prescripts.
There needs to be a single manager who is held to account to ensure financial control. The accounting officer reviewing management accounts with the chief financial officer is required with our delay every month.
Municipalities can increase their contribution to economic growth by improving the reliability, quality, and efficiency of these services however government, local government, and municipalities are top-heavy with employees and there is little interest in proving efficacy.
Where companies streamline staff, the complement structure is burdened with excessive personnel that is impacts on available financial resources.
Municipal employees and the skills they bring to the workplace are critical input in the delivery of all services a municipality delivers.
The objective of managing municipal personnel is therefore not necessarily to minimise the “wage bill”, but rather to ensure that people with the required skills are recruited, retained and
appropriately deployed.
Restore public confidence
We can not restore public confidence if proper records and control daily performance is not monitored. All city Departments Regular reviews on government institutions, and municipalities must be undertaken by an accredited organisation.
It is the responsibility of government institutions and municipalities that they should deliver services that society requires to maintain and improve its welfare.
Accountability in Public Services in South Africa
Why is accountability important in government and local government?
Strengthening local government accountability is vital. Strong local government financial accountability means that local people can affect their local government’s spending and taxation decisions. Local citizens also need to take responsibility for the consequences of those decisions and it is essential that there is transparency.
Transparency is an important principle of good governance. Absence of, or inaccessibility to, information often creates a sense of disempowerment, mistrust and frustration. Citizens in the broad sense have the right to know and public access to information. Citizens require a degree of clarity and openness about how decisions are taken. The poor and/or marginalised also play a pivotal role in policy formulation and implementation and the right to participate and have influence over how decisions are taken that affect their lives.
Transparency is also inextricably linked to governance, one definition of which is “a way of implementing policies through cooperation whereby representatives of the government, market and civil society participate in mixed public and private networks” (Bodegom et al.2008).
