Riyaz Patel
President Cyril Ramaphosa told ministers, premiers, and Mayors convening as the President’s Coordinating Council (PCC), that programmes that have been rolled out are “not in sync with government’s overarching strategy, and implemented on a piecemeal and silo basis.”
“Monitoring and evaluation has been inconsistent and at times vague, resulting in us having no clear line of sight of what is needed, where it is needed, how it will be done and how much it is costing,” Ramaphosa said.
“We are going to radically overhaul our implementation and service delivery model,” he said.
“This new dispensation seeks to change the face of rural and urban landscapes by ensuring complementarity between urban and rural development, with a deliberate emphasis on local economic development,” a statement from the presidency said.
Ramaphosa said government was aware of the shortcomings of the previous models, and that is why there needs to be a change, to “adopt an approach to development that is more practical, achievable, implementable and measurable.”
“The need for cooperative, collaborative and coordinated governance.”
He underlined that the “district-driven model is meant to turn plans into action, and ensure proper project management and tracking.”
National departments that have district-level delivery capacity will, together with provinces, Ramaphosa said “have to provide implementation plans that specify exactly where programmes will be located and exactly when they will be implemented.”
“As Ministers, as Premiers, as MECs and as Mayors, it is up to us to give effect to what is already clearly laid out in our Constitution: the need for cooperative, collaborative and coordinated governance.”
Ramaphosa said the plans each district will develop should focus on the following areas:
- managing urbanisation, growth and development,
- supporting local economic drivers,
- accelerating land release and land development,
- investing in infrastructure for integrated human settlements, economic activity and the provision of basic services,
- addressing service delivery problems in municipalities.
“We have, as I have said, to ‘Khawuleza.'”
‘Khawuleza’ is a new District Coordination Model which radically seeks to improve the impact of government service delivery and development.
The model focuses on 44 Districts and 8 Metros countrywide, and is envisaged as developmental spaces that will be strategic alignment platforms for all three spheres of government.
The new model will be piloted in the OR Tambo District Municipality in the Eastern Cape at a time to be announced.
“We will also soon be convening the Khawuleza Forums in districts, which will be the building-blocks and coordination mechanisms for the new model,” he said.
“The new District Coordination Model is not something we want to see in the distant future. It is an imperative of the here and now, because we are racing against time to improve the lives of our people,” Ramaphosa emphasized.
He added that it is nearly one year since the announcement of the Economic Stimulus and Recovery Plan, and that it is time to assess and track its progress.
“We need to build alliances with business, labour and civil society at district and local level so that we can leverage the resources of all social partners to meet developmental needs.”
The Deputy President and I will soon be conducting district visits to get a first-hand sense of existing projects and their potential for being fast-tracked.
“We must in the short term look at how to accelerate initiatives that have already been budgeted for and get down to implementation,” Ramaphosa said.
The president said the PCC will be indispensable in “driving the vision of a more joined up government which gives full meaning to cooperative governance as set out in our constitution.”
He added that the PCC must be more than just a meeting four times a year for the delivery of progress reports.
“We need to treat youth unemployment as the crisis that it is, and we have therefore developed a multi-pronged approach to bring young people into the world of work in far greater numbers,” Ramaphosa said.
This work, which cuts across all departments and spheres of government, he said, will be coordinated from the Presidency.
“We are finalising the establishment of a Project Management Office in the Presidency, which will establish a War Room that will coordinate the different interventions,” said Ramaphosa.
