Joburg Water's board has no qualified engineer, CDE report finds

Not one member of Joburg Water’s board is a professionally qualified engineer, in a city where nearly half the water pumped earns no revenue because of leaks, outages and ageing pipes.

The finding sits in a new report from the Centre for Development and Enterprise, which argues that political appointments have hollowed out the management of South Africa’s largest metro. At least seven of the city’s 24 most senior management posts are filled by acting appointees, and the city’s own annual reports record persistent shortages of engineers, finance professionals, ICT specialists, project managers and supply-chain experts.

The report, Kickstarting Delivery: Joburg’s Mission Critical Jobs, examines the 13 municipal entities that deliver water, electricity, waste collection and other core services. At least 10 of them are implicated in serious tender fraud. Political allegiance, the report finds, has repeatedly counted for more than competence when boards and senior posts are filled.

Johannesburg has had nine mayors and eight coalition administrations since 2016. Each change of guard has arrived with its own entourage of appointments, and the effect is visible in pockmarked roads and failing infrastructure.

What the numbers show

Joburg Water is the sharpest example. The utility loses close to half its pumped water before it reaches a paying customer, yet its board carries no qualified engineer. That is the body meant to oversee a large and complicated infrastructure business.

The staffing picture is just as uneven. Following the 2016 election, the EFF used its influence to push for the insourcing of workers employed through contractors. By 2019, about 1 879 cleaners and 1 600 security guards had been moved onto the municipal payroll at higher salaries, under a DA mayor. Their former managers and supervisors were not brought across with them, leaving many of those workers with wide discretion over when, how and whether they worked.

That pattern appears to have spread. A former deputy director estimated that only a third of employees were hardworking, with the rest made up largely of clock watchers and political appointees. A councillor has claimed that of roughly 35 000 employees, only 900 were actively doing their jobs.

Senior appointments and board positions are not bargaining chips to be divided among coalition partners.

“City departments and utilities cannot continue to operate as political fiefdoms,” CDE executive director Ann Bernstein said. “Senior appointments and board positions are not bargaining chips to be divided among coalition partners.”

The test after November

The report lands ahead of local government elections in November, and it frames the vote as a question about administration rather than personalities. “The first test of the government elected in November will be who it appoints to run Johannesburg,” Bernstein said. “No turnaround strategy will succeed if the institutions responsible for implementing it remain weak, politicised and poorly led.”

The CDE wants the next administration to fill the city manager post through a transparent and fair process, then turn to the three utilities with the greatest immediate bearing on whether Johannesburg works: Joburg Water, City Power and Pikitup. Their boards, the report argues, should be made up of people with the technical, financial and management experience to run what are effectively large infrastructure companies, and those boards should appoint competent chief executives and hold them to results.

One proposal aims at the coalition problem directly. Political parties should agree before the election to keep political office bearers out of procurement, appointments and operational decisions, and any coalition agreement should carry that commitment in writing. The principle is simple: politicians set policy and priorities, qualified professionals run the city.

Some problems will not wait for a conventional recruitment round. Where infrastructure is at immediate risk, the report suggests bringing in outside engineers and specialists on transparent, time-limited assignments while permanent appointments are made.

Performance, documented

The report also proposes that the new administration identify which senior jobs are mission critical, and screen out politically tainted or unsuitable candidates early by checking grievance history and adverse findings from the Auditor-General or the city’s Group Forensic and Investigation Service. The organogram itself needs review to find posts, rather than people, that have become redundant.

Performance management should be mandatory. “The main reason that South African municipalities struggle to dismiss underperformers for incapacity is that nobody documents their underperformance,” the report says. Handled properly, and without amounting to constructive dismissal, that process could allow unsuitable people to be removed within 12 months.

Organised labour is likely to resist the pace. The report points to the Pikitup strikes of 2015 and 2016, when workers acted outside the formal labour relations framework, striking without declaring a dispute and in defiance of Labour Court interdicts.

None of this fixes Johannesburg on its own. The report’s argument is narrower and more practical: the first test of the government elected in November will be who it appoints, how those appointments are made, and whether the people placed in mission critical jobs are given the authority to do the work and then held to account for it.

Source: Moneyweb, It’s time to get the political hacks out of Joburg city management