INLSA

Plans for rural development have not materialised and people will be waiting to hear what Premier Zweli Mkhize, inset, has to say about this in his State of the Province speech tomorrow.

Perhaps the biggest challenge to all the governments in the world, including that of KwaZulu-Natal, is how to get the massive but slow wheel of its administration, steeped in bureaucracy, to move faster and more efficiently to deliver to its electorate.

Year in and year out, as it has been the case with KZN, government leaders produce impressive speeches, committing themselves to providing services, only for such promises to take years, if at all, to materialise or begin to impact on the lives of the people.

So the public’s scepticism when it comes to grand speeches and declarations is not without merit. It goes without saying then that the government has to do something dramatic to regain the public’s trust and confidence, and repair its tattered image.

It is against this backdrop that Premier Zweli Mkhize will deliver his State of the Province address tomorrow. Certainly, what should be uppermost in his mind when he ascends the podium is how to bring a sense of urgency and speed to the business processes of government, and to show that the government is able to put its words into action.

Uppermost in the minds of many taxpayers is the seemingly widespread fraud and corruption that has spread its tentacles across the public sector.

Zakhele Ndlovu, a political commentator at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said: “These two problems are like a cancer that is destroying the fabric of our society. Besides depriving the province of the resources to improve the delivery of basic services, the prevalence of fraud and corruption reinforce the notion that Africans are corrupt and greedy people.”

KZN Premier Dr Zweli Mkhize

INLSA

The tools to fight corruption and fraud are already in place. The government just needs to ensure that they are in working order.

For example, the integrity management chief directorate, housed in the office of the premier, was responsible for more than 1 000 civil servants facing disciplinary action for one or another form of corruption and fraud.

However, the challenge is the length of time it takes to resolve these cases which has seen some public servants being suspended with full pay while loitering at home for years.

The government would do well to adopt some measures applied in the corporate sector to ensure speedy discipline. It is not enough to find out that a person has committed crime if he or she is going to spend years on the payroll while staying at home. This suggests that doing crime pays.

The response from the government to such criticism has been that cases of corruption exposed as a result of its actions receive no praise from the media or general public. However, probes like the Manase investigation into the financial affairs of the eThekwini metro, spearheaded by Co-operative Governance MEC Nomusa Dube – laudable as it may be – will pale into insignificance if nothing is done to bring to book those councillors and officials found to have violated municipal codes of conduct and/or supply-chain management regulations.

Investigations like the Manase probe and other revelations at other municipalities in the province offer Mkhize’s government an excellent opportunity to demonstrate strong leadership and send out a clear message that, in this province, crime does not pay.

The new political season being ushered in today also offers an opportunity for the KwaZulu-Natal government to show that it means business by not leaving important decisions and projects hanging indefinitely.

For example, what is happening with the dispute about King Shaka’s statue at the King Shaka International Airport? The original statue was removed after complaints from Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini that it depicted his predecessor as a herd boy, but that was about three years ago.

There was also a suggestion of a huge statue of Shaka to be erected somewhere on the banks of the uThukela River.

If the government got its act together, these could be iconic projects with loads of tourism potential for this province.

Three years ago there was also hype about turning the vast tribal area of eMacambini, near Mandeni, into a tourist drawcard with the backing of Dubai investors. But the project, announced with much fanfare during a previous State of the Province address, appears to have vanished without any sound explanation.

The government has also been quiet about the several initiatives announced with regard to rural development. Almost two and a half years into the five-year term of the present government, there is no policy in place on these initiatives, apart from the distribution of seeds and agricultural implements to rural people.

While this is important, there is no doubt that the rural communities expected far more than this when Mkhize at the time announced his commitment to focusing on stimulating rural development and to stop the migration into urban areas.

The pace at which the province is able to deliver key health, housing and education infrastructure still remains a serious challenge. It is not unfair for citizens to ask why long overdue projects like clinics and hospitals should not be expedited the same way projects linked to the Fifa soccer World Cup were.

The provincial planning commission, assembled by the government to expedite and unlock blockages to some key infrastructure projects in the province, and which has been operational for about a year now, should surely help to deal with this challenge.

To his credit, Mkhize has worked speedily to act against non-performing municipalities. In this regard, five municipalities, one of which had been taken over by an administrator, produced clean audits while 51 of 61 provincial municipalities obtained unqualified audits. More work needs to be done in this sector to ensure that other municipalities also attain clean audits before the deadline of 2014.

Also encouraging was the government’s turnaround, which saw its financial status turn into a positive balance after many years of overexpenditure.

On the issue of job creation, there has been debate on whether it is the work of the government to create jobs. The government can certainly create an atmosphere that would make investors see KwaZulu-Natal as a deserving investor destination.

Let’s hope that when Mkhize takes the podium tomorrow, he will add meat to the bones he has thrown our way in recent years. - The Mercury