The City of Cape Town is to make a "concerted effort" to cut down on the R15,8-million spent on consultants, and instead train council employees, especially senior managers, to do the jobs consultants are hired for.
So says City Manager Wallace Mgoqi, following President Thabo Mbeki's plea to local governments to start using internal municipal staff and stop using consultants.
Democratic Alliance councillor Belinda Walker said the initiative was "excellent".
But while Mgoqi tries to cut down on consultants, he has had to employ a consultant in his office to deal with the transformation of the municipality. This consultant has billed the city about R60 000 for one month's work.
For the 2003/04 financial year, the city allocated an annual budget of R15,8-million for expenditure on Unicity consultants.
However, this figure excluded consultants appointed to major construction projects, as these costs were allocated to those projects, said the city's expenditure director, Leonard Shnaps. If these figures were added, the amount spent on consultants each year would be pushed up dramatically.
Among the consultants are public relations companies, which charge between R600 and R1 500 an hour. However, also filling this function, the city has in its fulltime employ a communications director, marketing manager and three media liaison officers, while the mayor and nine mayoral committee members have their own media officers.
Consultants are also employed in departments such as planning and environment, public housing, transport, roads and stormwater, support services and Electricity Services.
Mgoqi controls the appointment of all consultants and the budget is tied to his office, which itself spent almost R100 000 - mostly on legal fees - on consultants during the 2003/2004 financial year which ended in June. The city has its own legal department.
Mgoqi said the city would respond to Mbeki's recent call to municipalities to stop employing consultants, and use internal staff instead.
Mbeki made his plea to local governments at the SA
local government conference held in the city last month.
He said it was time to "move beyond relying on consultants, crisis interventions and other interim measures and put in place effective senior management in municipalities".
Mgoqi said: "Anybody who is not on the city's payroll is considered a consultant. There is transparency in this matter. We will implement what the president says.
"His (Mbeki's) words make a lot of sense. We will transfer skills internally, because that is what we should be doing. We are trying to do this through the city's transformation and restructuring process.
"This matter is receiving priority attention."
The city has been accused of spending millions on consultants while it continued a moratorium on jobs and also planned to retrench employees.
In August the city said it would shed about 4 500 posts over the next four years through retrenchments, natural attrition (death, retirement), targetted voluntary severance packages, early retirement and expired contracts.
Walker said the city was employing consultants because for the past four years it hadn't "restructured" its staff base.
"Firstly we must get the restructuring finished and the need for consultants will fall away. Secondly, it's because a lot of people leave before there is an opportunity to transfer skills. For others there is just no space for jobs because equity has kicked in," said Walker.
In some instances council employees would not have the necessary skills because the previous officials hadn't transferred their experience to the new staff members, said Walker.
She didn't know how much the municipality had spent on consultants when the DA controlled the city council.