Political parties and voters are sustaining stupidity and corruption
At the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) Local Government Week held on the 8 September Cllr. Thembi Nkadimeng the President SALGA read a paper entitled “Building a Coherent Approach to Addressing the Interlinked and Interdependent Challenges facing Local Government in South Africa.
His speech was vital as it revealed the essence of a wide-spread South African problem.
Thembi said “With regard to political governance matters it is our observation that a key outcome of the 2016 municipal elections is that two-thirds of the elected councillors comprised of new deployees to the sector. This huge change of leadership resulted in a loss of institutional memory and imposed on the sector a need for escalated induction and other training/capacity building programs. Despite numerous interventions to increase the capacity of Councillors in the first four (4) years of the term of office, the gaps are blatant and the recent developments around COVID-19 have further exposed serious weaknesses in the leadership of many councillors. Every five years, the high turn-around in local government, exacerbated by lack of proper screening of candidates, sets the sector back in terms of leadership, governance and oversight stability. It is therefore our proposal that a new arrangement for the identification, deployment and capacitation of councillors has to be found.”
In a nutshell, political parties forward stupid people and voters then vote for the stupid’s and the organisation liable for training the stupid’s are struggling as some stupid’s are untrainable or it will take more than 4 years to train them properly. Oddly, by that time, the stupid’s are replaced by other stupid’s who must then also be trained and this is untenable as everything suffers.
Thus, the governance problems will not go away. The stupidity and corruption will continue as those in authority especially in the more remote municipalities have limited education and useful skills. As a result, the vast majority of municipalities has not and cannot and will probably not achieve a “clean audit”. There are some municipalities that are so badly managed that the Auditor General cannot issue a finding as records of the municipality are in an utter mess, as keeping receipts are optional.
Taking into concern that no education or any skill is required to enter politics, it is realistic to assume that the worst gravitate to politics. People steal when they assume the rest of us are the stupid’s.
Politics is perfect for the corrupt as answerability is optional and all the costs are to the ratepayer.
Cllr Yagyah Adams
Cape Muslim congress