SALGA welcomes coalition bill aimed at improving municipal stability

The South African Local Government Association has welcomed Cabinet’s decision to send the Municipal Structures Amendment Bill to Parliament, saying legislation is urgently needed to govern the growing number of coalition-led municipalities.

The bill, commonly referred to as the Coalition Bill, aims to bring greater stability, transparency and accountability to municipal coalitions. Coalition councils have grown significantly, from 27 after the 2016 elections to 70 after the 2021 elections, making them a defining feature of South Africa’s local government landscape.

SALGA spokesperson Motalatale Modiba said the absence of a legislative framework had allowed political instability to undermine service delivery across several municipalities and metros.

“The framework is very clear. It says the agreements that various parties come into when they are doing coalition negotiations should culminate in clear, municipal-specific and publicly available agreements. We are very clear about municipal-specific. It can’t be that in bargaining, parties will say because we are supporting you in municipal X, then you automatically support us in municipal B, without necessarily looking at the different dynamics that exist there,” Modiba said.

He said some metros had seen three or more mayors within a single term of office, with each change in political leadership disrupting policy implementation and service delivery.

“When you have an executive mayor coming into office from a different party, they come carrying a different mandate, a different programme of action, which means the city or municipality is having to constantly reset insofar as the political direction is concerned. That has had an impact in terms of the pace of delivery and in terms of affecting the lived experiences of communities,” Modiba said.

Modiba said the bill would address one of the most destabilising features of current coalition arrangements, namely the ease with which motions of no confidence could be called.

“At the moment, it’s a willy-nilly thing. We wake up tomorrow, we don’t agree because we failed to agree on how to allocate a resource, and it’s a motion of no confidence. We can’t operate like that. The bill will set a framework to say once council has been established, you cannot call for a motion of no confidence until a certain period has passed, and even then, these are the criteria that should be met first,” Modiba said.

He said coalition agreements also needed to be translated into municipal Integrated Development Plans so that service delivery commitments could be monitored and budgeted for, rather than being abandoned as parties focused on holding coalitions together.

On accountability to residents, Modiba said the current system left communities unable to hold coalition partners to account because agreements were not publicly available.

“I don’t know what that agreement is because it hasn’t been made public for me to be able to know that the coalition partners have agreed to these non-negotiables insofar as delivery is concerned, and therefore I can hold them to account,” Modiba said.

With local government elections approaching, Modiba called on political parties to begin transition planning now rather than waiting for election results, and to use SALGA’s existing coalition framework, developed with the Dula Oma Institute and the University of the Western Cape, as a guide until the bill was enacted.

He said legislation alone would not be sufficient, and that political parties needed to demonstrate greater maturity by prioritising governance over narrow political interests.

“There is a greater role that political parties need to play in demonstrating that they are indeed putting public interest before their own interest. What would be the purpose if ultimately we don’t see any positive impact on delivery? So there is a greater role, starting with the calibre of people that political parties put forth as candidates in the respective councils,” Modiba said.