By Nangamso Mabindla

Buffalo City Municipality has high hopes of being named as one of the top performing municipalities in the Eastern Cape at the regional round of the Vuna Municipal Performance Awards, which will be held in East London this evening.

The aim of the awards is to promote creative and innovative municipal service delivery, identify and support poorly performing municipalities, build confidence in municipalities, and improve the image of local government.

The Eastern Cape's winner will be named tonight from a shortlist of 10, and will be submitted to the national finals, which will be held on December 5. Provincial municipality winners will each receive R750 000, while the first runners up will get R500 000, followed by R250 000 for the second runners up.

Mbulelo Linda, spokesperson for the MEC for local government Gugile Nkwiti, said choosing one winner from 45 municipalities was not an easy task: "How we choose a winner is based on the fact that there are three categories of municipalities; an A category; a B category as well as six C categories of district municipalities."

He said performance was not only measured by service delivery but also by how the municipality conformed to the systems that underpinned local government and how innovative the municipality was in the face of challenges such as debt collection and revenue enhancement.

Buffalo City Executive Mayor Sindisile Maclean has been invited to speak at the award.

Matthew Mooneiya, his spokesperson, said Buffalo City had made a "four-hour submission to the Vuna awards' judges a few weeks ago".

Mooneiya said the report covered nearly three years of integration, institutional and operational transformation to push back frontiers of apartheid and create jobs in the private sector, service delivery, the revitalisation plan to promote a productive and inclusive city.

"We've covered all the bases and it is for the judges to decide if we've done enough to be the top performing municipality in the province," Mooneiya said.

The Vuna Awards are an initiative of the Department of Provincial and Local Government (DPLG), the National Productivity Institute (NPI), the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) and the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA).