Cyril Ramaphosa launches White Paper after admitting local government is broken

President Cyril Ramaphosa has outlined five major areas of reform in the revised White Paper on Local Government, saying South Africa must address the structural causes of municipal dysfunction rather than continue responding to service delivery failures.

Delivering the keynote address at the launch in Ekurhuleni on Thursday, Ramaphosa said the reforms would fundamentally change how municipalities were structured, financed, managed and held accountable, while strengthening cooperation across all three spheres of government.

The White Paper sets out to tackle dysfunction by reforming the entire system, not merely by responding to its symptoms.

The reforms come amid persistent problems with unreliable basic services, deteriorating infrastructure, financial mismanagement, corruption and weak administrative capacity across municipalities, nearly three decades after the adoption of the original White Paper in 1998.

Ramaphosa said the review had identified systemic weaknesses that could not be resolved by focusing on individual municipalities.

Too many communities have grown accustomed to services that are unreliable, infrastructure that is deteriorating and municipal administrations that are unresponsive. This cannot continue.

It is for this reason that we are launching the Revised White Paper on Local Government.

In 1998, the White Paper set out a blueprint for democratic local government.

We inherited a deeply fragmented system, deliberately designed to serve the interests of a minority while denying the majority of South Africans access to basic services and economic opportunity.

This revised White Paper lays the foundation for far-reaching legislative, institutional and financial reform of the entire local government system.

This White Paper represents a fundamental reassessment of how local government is structured, financed, managed and held accountable.

Secondly, the Revised White Paper proposes that local government be treated as one integrated system.

The District Development Model was introduced to bring government and its partners together around shared priorities in each district and metro.

The 1998 White Paper helped us establish democratic local government.

The task before us now is to make developmental local government work as it was intended.