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13 November 2007

Programme Director,
Executive Mayor of the Waterberg District Municipality, Clr Pinkie Kekana,
The Mayor of Bela Bela Local Municipality, Clr Ledwaba,
Mayors from other municipalities in Limpopo,
Speakers and Councillors,
Colleagues in the Executive Council,
Heads of Departments,
Officials from our government,
Representatives from the Department of Provincial and Local Government (dplg),
Members of the media,
Comrades and friends,
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen,

Tonight as we meet in the 2007 Vuna Awards having gone through seven years of democratic local government, we should all be asking ourselves: what progress have we made?

This question should arise in the context of the Five-Year Local Government Strategic Agenda currently under implementation. We implement this plan true to our commitment of making local government work better for our people.

I am sure that, at some point in your lives, you have heard people talking about win-or-lose situations, particularly in competitive environments. Well, tonight as I look across this hall, I see winners only. There can be no losers here tonight. For a change, we are having a win-win situation.

On behalf of the Department of Local Government and Housing, our developmental partners, the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA), the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) and Productivity SA, I would like to thank you all for joining us this evening on the occasion of the 2007 Vuna Awards to celebrate the extraordinary efforts that our colleagues at various municipalities in the province have put to make sure that local government delivers on its mandate.

Vuna, as some of you might already have learned, is a Nguni word meaning "harvest together". Ka Sepedi re re "Re buna mmogo". And, as a symbol, the Vuna Awards celebrate those who are helping to ensure that together as government and the people we harvest the fruits of our democracy.

The Vuna Awards were introduced in 2003 to recognise those municipalities that are innovative and excellent in fulfilling their service delivery mandate as contained in various pieces of legislation and other commitments to the people.
The awards we are handing over tonight recognise municipalities that go beyond usual standards to provide excellent services to communities. And, as you can see by the high number of entries to the competition, we in Limpopo are not short of such outstanding performances.

Programme Director
The criteria for the awards are based on the Key Performance Areas which are:
* service delivery and infrastructure development;
* local economic development;
* municipal transformation and institutional development;
* financial management and viability; and
* good governance.

Our emphasis on these "Key Performance Areas" is informed by the conviction that the local government sphere is an indispensable antidote for dealing with a syndrome of issues that constitute the most basic provincial challenges: these are issues such as underdevelopment, stagnation and poverty. Accordingly, as every individual municipality improves its own performance, we enhance our province's institutional possibility effectively to meet those challenges.

The Municipalities are at the coalface of service delivery. Those who are privileged to serve our people at this level should regard theirs as a calling, a labour of love and not a career. The Municipalities are our service delivery agents and for us failure is not an option. This is why through "Project Consolidate" – we offer hands-on support to those municipalities that were struggling in certain areas. In terms of this programme, we help municipalities to overcome their current difficulties of capacity constraints and to flourish into the future! These municipalities are given access to a much larger pool of expertise in various functional areas of municipal governance. Our intervention through Project Consolidate is yielding results. We have seen the number of municipalities submitting their financial statements on time increasing drastically among other improvements.

Our work is continuously informed by the popular feedback we receive from the people. The ANC participated in the last Local Government Election with a manifesto that says we have a "plan to make local government work better for our people". That plan has been translated into the Five-Year Local Government Strategic Agenda and the excellence we are celebrating here tonight bears testimony to the successful implementation of the plan. For instance, we know that currently almost all our municipalities are providing free basic water and electricity to deserving families as captured in their indigent registers. We also know that with respect to redressing electrification and sanitation backlogs, we have realized considerable progress.

Programme Director

The main objective of the Vuna Awards is to motivate municipalities to enhance their performance and productivity, find creative ways of enhancing municipal viability, promote learning and sharing of best practices amongst and between municipalities and to improve the profile and publicise good practices by municipalities, amongst others things.

By constantly giving recognition to those municipalities that go beyond the call of duty to deliver services to the people as we are doing here tonight, we hope that we will achieve the goals I have already mentioned as we intensify the struggle against poverty and underdevelopment.

As a country, we are committed to meet the Millennium Development Goals including halving poverty by the year 2014. Of course, this long-term goal begins here, at municipal level.

The Chinese would tell you that "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". And that is also true with the situation in government. If we are to get the state machinery functioning well, we've got to get the local government system right. That is our first step in our journey of a thousand miles.

Fortunately, as I have indicated earlier, we are not short of shining examples. In fact, we've got them plenty in this room alone. I'm sure we'll all leave here having been motivated by the good work our colleagues are doing in their respective municipalities.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to congratulate all the award winners as well as those municipalities that have entered the competition. I would like to commend them for sharing their achievements with us, thereby making it possible for all of us to peek into a future of brighter possibilities.

In Limpopo, we believe that development is about people. I would like to encourage you all, in your individual capacity, as teams and municipalities that are working hard to deliver services to the people, to keep up the excellent work and continue to work tirelessly to make our province a better place to live in.

In conclusion, I would like to refer you to a reminder issued last year during the national Vuna Awards ceremony by Minister Sydney Mufamadi. He reminded us that, "as a result of having succeeded to overcome some of the old problems, new ones have sprung into life".

As we reticulate more and more households, it puts a strain on bulk service provision. We therefore need to plan ahead and confront the challenges of bulk service infrastructure and storage capacities.

We say that new opportunities call for new skills, in particular the knowledge economy. This is a national call in the context of Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition (JIPSA). We need to encourage our youth to enrol for Mathematics and Science subjects at school because we need more engineers, town planners and financial managers.

As we approach the end of the year 2007, I would like to say to all of you that we should carry the positive spirit of excellence prevailing here tonight into the New Year so that we can make continuous improvements on our work in order to tackle even the new problems that Minister Mufamadi said "have sprung to life."

I thank you

Issued by: Limpopo Provincial Government
13 November 2007