Thembi Nkadimeng has come a long way from her days as a student activist to mayor and now as president of the SA Local Government Association (SALGA).
Nkadimeng’s calm demeanor belies the huge responsibilities of heading a local municipality and a national organisation looking after local government structures when we meet on a warm afternoon at a trendy Polokwane restaurant.
She looks anything but a strained administrator leading a national body tasked with helping the country to get to work at a time when evidence suggests local government structures are on the brink of total collapse.
If you met her in a social gathering you wouldn’t even know she carries the added burden of years of fighting a difficult battle to resolve the mysterious disappearance of her activist sister, Umkhonto we Sizwe undercover agent Nokuthula Simelane.
Simelane who disappeared while on a MK mission in Johannesburg from Swaziland in 1983, is presumed to have been killed by members of the apartheid regime’s notorious security branch.
At the insistence of Nkadimeng, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) is finally taking action against her alleged killers. Her body, though, has never been found.
Nkadimeng, 46, is the anti-thesis of a government bureaucrat. She is a sassy, hip, a snazzy dresser with striking features that could easily mistake her for someone who’s just landed straight out of Addis Ababa.
She carries herself with a somewhat laid back, person-of-the-people demeanor. Fresh faced with a complexion like a ripe yellow peach, Nkadimeng, also has this easy, disarming laughter and has no airs about her.
She comes across more as one of them girls than the first citizen of a municipality. Yet underneath the air of humility and simplicity, one gets a sense that behind the charm lies a resolute, uncompromising personality that takes no prisoners when the situation so demands.
She is an ANC cadre through and through, having served and toyi-toyed through the ranks from Cosas during her high school days in the Mpumalanga Highveld township of Mzinoni near Bethal; to her days at University of Limpopo in the mid-90s where she rose to the leadership structures of the SA Students Congress.
The holder of a Higher Education Diploma, a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree, BPhil (Policy Studies) and Advanced Program in Management certificate has also served in the ANCWL and ANC provincial executive committee structures.
The mother of three counts among her role models ANC old hand Dr Naledi Pandor and her former comrade in SALGA, Parks Tau who is now deputy minister in the Department of Co-operative Governance.
It has become the norm for mayors to walk about with an entourage larger than that of the president even. But Nkadimeng, who had attended a workshop in Polokwane all day walks into the trendy restaurant for our interview on her own.
“You know what I like about her?” she says about Pandor, pausing to carefully choose her words. “She is painfully honest. Before you approach her you must have read your stuff. She doesn’t inculcate a culture of being worshipped. She wants you to apply your mind before she offers her advice.”
She looks up to Tau as well and often consults him for counsel. “I call him a local government encyclopedia. He has been there. He has given himself time to learn. I also think he is this person who approaches each and every problem with a mindset and a question of how it can be resolved not that it’s difficult I don’t know how it can be resolved.
“He has that element of humility, laid back. I don’t have that thing when I’m stuck I should be afraid to approach him,” she says of the former City of Joburg mayor.
Nkadimeng also cites the late former ANC leader and minister Collins Chabane as one of her mentors, having worked with him in the provincial department of roads and public works. “He was a visionary,” she says.
Nkadimeng took over as president of SALGA at the end of June when Auditor General Kimi Makwetu released an audit report that laid bare the shocking state of affairs at the country’s municipalities.
Makwetu’s 2017/18 report showed that only 18 of the 257 district and local municipalities received an unqualified audit opinion with no findings.
“We need to find answers,” says Nkadimeng. She has been executive mayor of the Polokwane Local Municipality since 2014 and has since then been highly involved in SALGA, rising to the position of deputy president.
She was elected president after her predecessor Tau was seconded to national government as Deputy Minister in the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (CoGTA).
The evidence presented by Makwetu’s audit means Nkadimeng and her colleagues at SALGA have their cut out.
SALGA is a Schedule 3A public entity whose role is to help ‘transform local government to enable it to fulfil its development mandate.’
This includes capacity building, supporting, advising, sharing knowledge and information and playing an oversight role among its 257 local government members.
However, SALGA doesn’t have the legal powers to take action against municipalities but can only advice and intervene through training and offering support where necessary.
In her budget vote speech in July, CoGTA Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma cited weak governance, non-compliance with legislation, poor quality of annual financial management, supply chain management and performance challenges as some of the contributing factors to the malaise.
Nkadimeng says one of the major contributing factors is the lack of capacity and skills levels, especially at rural municipalities. “What does it take you to be a councillor? There’s not even a requirement for matric. It says bring the numbers. If I get 10 votes with [a] standard two and you get eight votes with a Masters degree it doesn’t matter,” says Nkadimeng.
“We need to change legislation. For me to be a councillor I need to be able to do oversight. In the country close to 66% of our councillors do not have a post matric qualification.
“Now there [is an] expectation that these 66% must be able to read the budget, understand it, ask questions all the time,” she says.
Nkadimeng says SALGA spends a lot of time and money training councillors through institutions such as the Wits Business School, but this has its own challenges. “The weakness we have as well is that they [councillors] register for courses then drop out. [And] we can’t take action against them.”
One of the telling findings by Makwetu was that 18% of municipalities did not have municipal managers during the year under review and that 51 did not have fill posts for chief financial officers.
“There’s a huge distinction between what we have now in legislation and the law and what is practically happening,” Nkadimeng points out.
She argues that the Municipal Structures Act [117 of 1998] which grades municipalities is in fact putting smaller municipalities at a disadvantage when it comes to recruitment and retention of skilled personnel.
Due to their low grading smaller municipalities fail to attract and retain skills due to pay disparity. As a result they are forced to employ inexperienced candidates in crucial fields such as engineering which in turn leads to poor output and loss of money for the municipality.
In turn municipalities turn to utilising independent consultants which also adds to their spending. Occupying the position of mayor on a political party ticket means that one has to play a delicate balancing act to satisfy the whims and wishes of the party and to also be firm when applying the rules.
Nkadimeng says some of the biggest contributors to non-payment of services are government departments and big business. Generally those in power fear acting against defaulting government departments for fear of upsetting their political party chiefs.
This coupled with a general failure and systems to collect revenue from residents leads to the situation municipalities find themselves in now, owing Eskom and water boards billions of rands.
But Nkadimeng has learnt that in order to keep the municipality’s coffers in good stead, she has to act without fear or favour. Last year she caused a stir when she ordered the electricity at parliamentary village in Polokwane be cut off for defaulting.
Even premier Chupu Mathabatha’s official home wasn’t spared.
“I take the backlash,” unfazed Nkadimeng says in response to how she deals with the obvious uproar following such actions.
Nkadimeng says SALGA wants government to come up with a system that enables it to blacklist officials who are fired for mismanagement and corruption to ensure they never return to public service.
She says while there appears to be a general reluctance by municipalities to act against those cited in wrongdoing, those municipalities that have taken further steps are hampered by the lax attitude of the police in dealing with corruption cases.
“Currently we are sitting with a lot of municipalities that have taken appropriate action but the cases are not moving. The SAPS [seems to have this] laxity in the system. It’s a long value chain and everybody needs to play his part,” she says.
Nkadimeng says part of the solution to the ailing local government sector would be a radical change in attitude among employees.
“There is a lack of urgency,” she emphasizes.
When not busy with ANC politics, Polokwane or SALGA, Nkadimeng prefers spending time at home and enjoys a good braai with friends. “I’m generally a home buddy,” she says.
