Cape Town is a large and complicated metro, with 3,5 million residents spread across 2 500 square kilometres. It has 23 000 permanent staff members, 210 councillors, 23 subcouncils, and an annual budget of R23 billion. It encompasses numerous vibrant business districts, but also some very poor areas, including more than 200 informal settlements.
This is a huge challenge, as is the housing backlog.
As regards service delivery, the metro's competencies include water, electricity, and solid waste.
Other services include roads, transport, law enforcement, fire services, emergency services, housing, and health. In many areas, different levels of government co-operate with one another. City law enforcement units collaborate almost continuously with the SAPS, particularly over substance abuse and crime in the inner city. Another example is preparation for the 2010 World Cup, as well as public transport, including the Rapid Integrated Transport System.
The city has been recognised in a number of ways. In 2008 the then executive mayor, Helen Zille, was named the best mayor in the world, and in 2007 the Department of Environment and Tourism named Cape Town as the cleanest metro in the country. A recent testimonial from the National Assembly ranked Cape Town as best city out of the country's 283 municipalities. The city won this award because of the way in which it deals with poverty, access to basic services, economic activity and infrastructure, and because its citizens are well-qualified. Moodie's credit rating for the city is AA2, which is at the high end of the five metros. Cape Town has received unqualified audits for the past five years. Despite its successes, there is still much to do.
How are these successes achieved?
The city attempts to respond to residents' needs. It engages in extensive public consultation, including a schedule of road shows that produce inputs for its Integrated Development Plan. Residents overwhelmingly say they are concerned about housing, crime, and jobs.
In the administration, structure follows strategy.
Integrating the Unicity of Cape Town from the seven municipalities that preceded it was a huge challenge. There were different organizational cultures, different conditions of service, and sometimes major disparities in salaries for basically the same jobs. This required a large-scale organisational realignment process with clean government as a major goal. The focus was on proper structures, and aligning those structures to the city's strategy. Every staff member was given a clear job description, with reporting lines, responsibilities, a pay scale, and a title. So everybody knew where they were on the organogram.
The next step is to populate that structure with good people. Selections are some of the most important decisions you make in an organisation, and they are difficult to reverse.
The city prioritises clean government. Clean and open government will attract investors, who are the creators of wealth and jobs. Clean government comes from accountability, and accountability needs transparency. So all Cape Town Council meetings and Mayoral Committee meetings are open to the public and to the media. That ensures that officials and politicians can be held accountable.
In terms of openness for tenders, tender awards, the media, interested parties and the public generally can attend sittings of the Bid Adjudication Tender Award Committee. There is also a fraud hotline, and an external agency checks that reports are properly attended to.
The focus is very clearly on service delivery, cutting down on peripheral activities. One aspect of this was implementing a system to improve response times. An electronic notification system called C3 was set up. When a complaint is received from one of numerous centres it is logged, and will remain on the system until it is properly closed.
Managers have to go to our Portfolio Committee every month, and report on how many logs have not been closed or actioned. When a complaint is logged off, the relevant official is held accountable.
Managers are constantly under review to resolve problems reported to the system.
There is a strong drive for quality management using ISO standards. Processes are reviewed from start to finish to see if there are any wasted resources. Every single business improvement project undertaken over the past two years has either found that things can be done with the same number of employees, or with fewer. So genuine efficiencies have been gained.
Risks are faced. They are measured, and managed via an enterprise-wide risk management programme. The risk register is presented to the autonomous external audit committee, which assesses how risks are being dealt with.
David Beretti is Executive director: corporate services, City of Cape Town
This is an extract from the Centre for Development and Enterprise publication: "South Africa's Public Service: Learning from success", CDE Round Table, Number 13 November 2009. The full report held on the seminar held in September 2009 can be accessed here (PDF).
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
