Picture: THINKSTOCK
Picture: THINKSTOCK

WITH the municipal elections coming up later this year, I would like to make the following suggestion to the Municipal Demarcation Board. We are all aware of the problems of service delivery, potholed streets, crumbling infrastructure, fraud and corruption in municipal government, particularly smaller municipalities.

Part of the problem is that many of these municipalities are far too large and many don’t have competent personnel. I therefore recommend (1) that we reduce the size of municipalities so that each town, big or small, has a smaller area to cover and is therefore able to manage its functions better, and (2) that we remove all administrative and executive functions from the municipal level and amalgamate these functions at regional or provincial level, thereby leaving individual municipalities to concentrate on service delivery instead of wasting time and resources on administrative paperwork (where fraud and corruption thrives) and party-political machinations.

By centralising administrative and executive functions, government will be better able to control spending and, by achieving economies of scale, hopefully reduce costs as well.

Nick McConnell
Howick