REPORT ON SKILLS LEVELS IN
MUNICIPALITIES
Presentation to the Portfolio Committee on
Local Government
06 September 2005
OVERVIEW OF PRESENTATION
This presentation covers the following aspects:





Background
Key observations
Recent and emerging observations
Technical challenges
Recommendations
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BACKGROUND
 Report part of the FOSAD task to review the
capacity and organisation of the state
 Part of this task was the need to undertake a
skills audit that will capture the current and
existing skills in the local government sector.
 The purpose is to indicate the problems relating
to acquiring and retaining competent skills and
capacity for the realisation of the vision of
developmental local government.
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BACKGROUND
 The report captures key observations extracted
variously from a number of data sources and
surveys conducted by among others, the
Municipal Demarcation Board (2004/5); Local
Government SETA Workplace Skills Plans
(2003/4); South African Institute of Civil Engineers
(2005); and the Development Bank of South Africa
(2004).
 Efforts are underway to consolidate all the
available local government human resource
information in the possession of various
stakeholders into a concise, focused Skills Audit
Baseline-information Report.
KEY OBSERVATIONS

The local government and water sectors are facing a large increase
in the demand for skills as a result of the following factors:
a) The transformation and restructuring agenda of the sector
c) Employment equity considerations
b) The transformation of human resource management practices, and

The overall number of employees within the sector has remained
relatively stable over the last number of years since demarcation in
2000 at approximately 230 000.

However, more significant than retrenchments has been the
considerable outflow of skills from the sector because of resignations,
particularly from managerial and skilled technical occupations.
q
There is a high proportion of those leaving the sector doing so
because of death. It could be assumed that these deaths are
HIV/Aids linked, escalating the need for training because of staff
KEY OBSERVATIONS
 Almost 44% of employment in the sector is still in the lower end
plant and machine operators and elementary occupations.
Though only one-fifth of employment resides in the technician and
associated professional, senior management and leadership
categories, this is where the bulk of skill needs and shortages are.
q Significant numbers of people in the category NQF 4,5 and 6
appear to be leaving the sector, and the replacement demand for
skills is not being fully met, either through recruitment or through
skills development initiatives.
q The greatest problems with acquiring and retaining skills has
been in the professionals, senior management, and technicians &
associated professionals, occupational categories. This outcome is
expected given widespread evidence of skill shortages in these
high-end occupations across the economy.
KEY OBSERVATIONS
The following is a summary of key scarce skills within the sector:
Strategic management skills, including policy skills and those
needed to lead, develop, monitor and evaluate IDP’s (Integrated
Development Plans)
 Financial management skills
 Contract management skills with particular emphasis on building
good procurement practices, and
 An overriding concern with the development of political and
administrative leadership in the sector.
 Project management skills
 ABET (Adult Basic Education)
 Technical skills of all types
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KEY OBSERVATIONS
 Recruitment into the sector is reasonably limited, and is focussed
on skills
replacement. The bulk of the recruitment in the local government
sector is in the following categories: elementary occupations (30%);
clerks and service workers (21%); senior officials and managers
(11%)
 The numbers of new labour market entrants in each municipality
and province are too small to determine any significant sectoral
trends. The system of internship within local government and water
is not at all developed.
Staffing Levels
 MDB observes that, while the staffing levels have almost doubled
since 2002, the Free State Province's average district municipality
staffing levels are significantly lower than those found in other
provinces.
KEY OBSERVATIONS

The staffing levels in the district municipalities in the Eastern Cape
show a steady decline.

Mpumalanga and North West demonstrate slightly lower levels in
2004 when compared with 2002 average staffing result.

However, provinces in which a decrease in staffing levels would be
expected, given the water and sanitation authorization for local
municipalities, such as in the Western Cape and Northern Cape, this
was not found. Rather, the Western Cape Province demonstrates one
of the highest staffing level increases from 2002 to 2004.

With regard to the local municipality staffing levels in 2002 and 2004,
the Municipal Demarcation Board states that the following provinces
demonstrate an average decline:
1. Eastern Cape;
2. Free State;
3. Gauteng, and
4. KwaZulu Natal.
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KEY OBSERVATIONS

The remaining provinces all show increasing staffing levels over
the years, however, they tend to be slight.

In all instances, the average staffing levels for local municipalities
are greater than that at district level. This is to be expected given
the different roles and responsibilities played by district and local
municipalities in the delivery of services.

Gauteng and the Western Cape on average, remain the two
provinces with the most human resource capacity at local
municipality level.

The provinces with poor ratio per employee to household tend to
be those that contain municipalities covering the former
Bantustan areas.

The municipalities in the large urban centres have significantly
larger staff complements than those found in the Integrated
Sustainable Rural Development Strategy (ISRDS) areas.
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KEY OBSERVATIONS
Technical staff
The South African Institute of Civil Engineers (SAICE) Report (2005)
observes that,

Traditionally local government has been a major employer of civil
engineering professionals, with engineers commanding the key
roles of City Engineer and senior engineers/designers, whilst civil
technicians have generally been used to manage maintenance
and operations.

An appreciation and understanding of the importance of
professionals in local government has been lost, as a result of the
restructuring in local government and the appointment of an
additional, non-technical senior level of management.

The Institute alleges that significant numbers of professional staff
have been offered early retirement, or have been replaced by
non-technical decision makers.
KEY OBSERVATIONS
 The introduction of equity targets has resulted in the sector losing
staff, and not
being able to fill the vacant posts.
The reason for this is that insufficient black professionals have
reached the level
of experience required, since black graduates only started
entering the
profession in larger numbers in the late 1990’s.
Stringent criteria with regard to professional competency for
engineers required in the past have been relaxed and in many
instances done away with altogether.
Inexperienced, young technicians, graduates in other built
environment or engineering fields, or even non-technical staff is
employed in senior positions in order to satisfy equity ratios.
KEY OBSERVATIONS
In a research carried out by SAICE (2005) included a complete
census of all civil professionals in the 284 local, and district
municipalities and metros. The civil engineering statistics are as
follows:
No civil professionals
 74 of the 231 local councils have no civil engineers,
technologists or
technicians
 4 of the 47 district councils have no civil engineers,
technologists or
technicians
Only one civil technician
KEY OBSERVATIONS
Only young staff
 43 local councils employ only technologists and technicians under
the age of 34
 6 district councils employ only technologists and technicians under
the age of 34
Only 70 with civil engineers
 Only 45 local councils had any civil engineers on their staff
 Only 25 district councils employ any civil engineers on their staff
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KEY OBSERVATIONS
 Those local and district municipalities which did have staff reported
that on average 35% of the existing posts were vacant, in addition
to newly created posts not having been filled.
RECENT AND EMERGING OBSERVATIONS
 The Local Government SETA is currently engaged in a Sectoral
Skills Plan review
process to be incorporated into the final submission to Minister of
Labour on 30
September 2005.
 Very few questionnaires (on scarce skills)responses (approximately
25) have been received so far from W. Cape, N. Cape, and E.
Cape.
 Although this is not enough information to make claims for the
KEY OBSERVATIONS
Here are the emerging observations with regard to skills gaps:
 Senior IT specialists
 Senior medical & allied staff
(Medical Officer of Health
- clinic administrators/ managers, MOH
 Environmental health specialists & occupational health & safety specialists
 Librarians (surprisingly, and across all responses)
 LED (Local Economic Development) officers/ specialists (again across all
responses)
 Certain indications of shortage of finance managers/ senior finance people
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KEY OBSERVATIONS
 Engineers
 Electricians (across all submissions)
 Meter readers
 Firefighters and emergency services workers

There are indications that where specialist posts are filled
- like
engineering, LED and Urban Planning, inadequately qualified people are
placed in these jobs.

Another interesting observation is that the majority of the vacancies relative
to posts available are in clerical and basic occupational categories
(unskilled workers).

There are major vacancies in the support areas in municipal finance such
as, cashiers, clerks, housing and housing administration, credit control
clerks, general administration clerks.

Labourers in all areas including water and waste, drain laying and refuse
removal also appear to be lacking.
KEY OBSERVATIONS
 Very few vacancies are being declared at senior management and
management level.
 However, people occupying these positions appear not to be
adequately qualified for the jobs (in terms of the relevant National
Qualifications Framework levels).
 It appears that there is salary/ rank inflation, thus resulting in
sacrificing salary allocations at lower level for higher-level staff.
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TRAINING CHALLENGES
Financial skills
 Financial management training ranks foremost among
capacitation requirements of almost every local authority.
the
 All councillors are of the view that there could be no effective
institutional performance without firm “financial foundations”.

Secondary level of financial personnel involved in the day-to-day running
of councils – including both internal financial administration and persons
involved in the billing for services – needs urgently to receive considerable
additional training and ongoing support if councils are to arrest the payment
and fiscal crises they confront currently.

All councils, including (in many cases, especially) the Metropolitan councils,
face tremendous difficulties in terms of simply calculating and billing
consumers correctly.
TRAINING CHALLENGES
Technical skills

A lack of technical capacitation could become a key challenge for the
majority of municipalities in South Africa.

This is most evident in low capacitated municipalities, where technical staff
without adequate experience and qualifications has been recruited at all
levels.

Technical training, especially in low capacity rural councils, runs a close
second in terms of immediate market demand.

The demand analysis noted that there is a considerable shortage of
technical skills across the full spectrum of local authorities.

These requirements need to be addressed if local authorities are to
succeed in their primary function of delivering effective services and
maintaining and developing local infrastructure.
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TRAINING CHALLENGES

Recent changes in municipal legislation, as well as the requirement that
“basic services” be provided at no cost to all residents, add to the need for
capacitation in the technical sphere.

In addition to service-specific skills (engineers, pump repairmen, etc.) the
study noted a general shortage of appropriate Information Technology
skills.

This affects the running of technical departments, billing systems,
accounting systems, and the general administration of local authorities.

Whilst some strides have been made in improving the IT capacity of local
government, this needs to be enhanced considerably.
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TRAINING CHALLENGES
Institutional capacity

Institutional development and human resource capacity development are
amongst the most urgent tasks confronting local government today.

Councils across the spectrum face a growing crisis of institutional
sustainability.

In terms of institutional training, it is important to address critical
shortcomings in institutional and associated human resource capacity in
municipalities across the board.

Institutional development includes the development of proper management
procedures and the training of supervisors.

It also includes the need to promote general “institutional awareness”, for
example, by providing training relating to the changing legal context within
which local government exists, and relating to the myriad of new legislation
that often overwhelms local government practitioners.
RECOMMENDATIONS

Developmental local government requires both common and unique
capabilities to equip its cadre of leadership.

A core of municipal leadership (elected and appointed) possessing the
leadership capabilities, service ethos and orientation towards development
that developmental local government demands is a precondition for
sustainable and performance-driven municipal
government in South Africa.

There is a need for strategic human performance interventions that can
impact on the individual performance of managers and staff of
municipalities.

These interventions should seek to shape and affect the perspective,
orientation and contribution of local officials to government’s program of
transformation change and development path.
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RECOMMENDATIONS
Such human performance interventions should include:

Identifying the minimum capacity required to deliver the government’s
programs – insistence on professional criteria and specified minimum
qualifications and experience (especially with regard to technical staff).

Avoiding employing inexperienced and non-technical individuals in senior
positions

Attracting, remunerating and retaining scare skills. Provision of appropriate
motivation and
resources to enable workplace training and range of experience required.

A clear need to work collaboratively with various professional
bodies/associations to inform, assist mentoring and coaching of
professionals.

Introduction of special advisors on professional and technical services
(finance, engineering and economic services) located appropriately at
RECOMMENDATIONS

Professional bodies and associations can also assist in this regard –
explore the use of retired professionals.

Municipal managers becoming champions of change. They must possess a
combination of managerial competence, organizational savvy and political
sensitivity to perform their role effectively as champions of fundamental
change

Locating that capacity where it matters – scarce skills and resources
(professional/technical) to be located in key areas (e.g. district level) to
service all municipalities in their jurisdiction. Thus making better use of
resources that have been consolidated into larger structures

Streamlining of non-technical senior management – to avoid delay in
decision making and lack of appreciation and understanding of the
upstream or downstream effect of new developments

Assessing current skills development programmes to ascertain the extent
to which they are aligned with the unique challenges posed by the
developmental thrust of the South African local government system.
RECOMMENDATIONS
 Building of a single public service dedicated to integrated service
delivery and
adoption of an ethical, problem-solving and constructive approach to
working life
THANK YOU
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