By Nangamso Mabindla
13 July 2005

THE national government is throwing its weight behind municipalities. Service delivery is the core function of every municipality and the national Department of Local Government is looking at ways to assist metros make improvements.

Driven by the desire to revitalise local government, the department initiated Project Consolidate. Its aim is to increase the speed of service delivery.

Project Consolidate is a two-year pilot programme. It will enable the national government to help local governments deal with challenges in a hands-on way.

Teams have been deployed to work at municipal level to assist with the practical issues of service delivery and local governance, including public participation, indigent policy, free basic services and billing systems.

In the Eastern Cape, the Nelson Mandela Metro and Buffalo City are two of the 12 municipalities countrywide that were chosen for the pilot project.

Pumeza Lujabe is the service delivery facilitator working with Buffalo City.

She explained that Project Consolidate was a process of ensuring that systems were developed with the municipalities that could be replicated elsewhere.

"It is a process of putting in place a system that creates an environment where replicable models are developed with municipalities that are operating closest to best practice."

The department was not trying to police municipalities, she explained. It was necessary to fast track the delivery of essential services like electricity and adequate sanitation. As such, areas that threatened to stifle such delivery needed to be identified, Lujabe said.

Buffalo City was one of the municipalities that was well managed and understood local government's mandate. "Through Project Consolidate, the [Department of Local Government] is embarking on a process that seeks to learn from and add value to municipalities such as Buffalo City. "The state of readiness of this city is superior to most," she said.

This was evident in the awards the City had received, including the 2003 Vuna Award for best municipality in the country.

"Project Consolidate is meant to work with such municipalities in an effort to develop and test models that can begin to be replicated in other municipalities so that they are able to work as efficiently as the Buffalo City Municipality," Lujabe said.

"However, it is no secret that even the best can be improved. It is also no secret that for others to follow the best, the best must be striving for perfection. It is this ideal that Project Consolidate seeks to achieve."

One aspect that would be investigated was the billing system. Lujabe said that although it was operating satisfactorily, it was in this area that Project Consolidate sought to learn and help the municipality to improve.

This would create a model that other billing systems could replicate.

The department acknowledged that the information technology systems the City used were among the best in the province. "Current problems in the billing system probably lie elsewhere - in areas that feed into the existing system," Lujabe said.