The municipal demarcation process which was finalised by the Demarcation Board in time for the municipal elections of 2000 was fraught with controversy. The notion of ‘wall-to-wall’ municipalities one could understand, but the fact that in some areas there would be two municipalities was difficult to fathom. The former dispensation when the regional council served the less densely-populated areas between the urban municipalities seemed to work very well. Such aberrations as the cross-border municipalities, which have been the sites of such tension, and the separation, in defiance of all logic, of Worlds View and Hilton from Pietermaritzburg, are just some of the decisions which were confounding in the extreme.

At the chamber, we were always concerned about the introduction of a fourth tier of government. This was emphatically denied by the proponents of the new order who stressed that local and district municipalities were complementary spheres and the former was not intended to be subservient to the latter. This has proved to be naive in the extreme. De facto, district councils have been regarded as an umbrella tier and it is through these over-arching structures that government has preferred to work.

In our area, this resulted in a situation, which has proved increasingly untenable, where the district had far less capacity and a much smaller annual budget than the local municipality of Msunduzi. It seems that the Demarcation Board had some recognition of this unexpected state of affairs, for it declared the areas of Msunduzi, Mangaung (Bloemfontein) and Buffalo City (East London) to be “aspirant metros”. Exactly what the intentions were is not clear. When the chamber, among others, argued for the area to be given the status of a metropolitan prior to the 2005 elections, our submission was totally ignored. So we laboured on with Pietermaritzburg employers paying over seventy percent of the levies that accrued to the district municipality. Nothing like that percentage came back to the city and, worse still, much of the money was not used for constructive development in disadvantaged areas. Since the local municipality had the capacity and was in possession, if you like, of the service delivery, several functions which should have been performed by the district remained in the hands of the Msunduzi Municipality whose rate-payers bore their cost. One thinks of the airport and the landfill site, for example, both expensive facilities which should have been managed and paid for by the district.

In preparation for the next municipal elections, however, the Board has signified its intention to remove the ‘aspirant’ status and declare Msunduzi to be a metropole. This is dependent upon evidence being presented to show that the area meets the criteria for such a status. Also, time has to be allowed for people to make submissions in this regard. That the city does meet the criteria is beyond question in our view and, more than ever, the Chamber believes that the move is essential. Two municipal administrations, two mayors, two sets of councillors in the same city is plain ludicrous and we cannot wait until the city and its economically-linked surrounding area is consolidated into one integral municipal entity.

Andrew Layman: PCB CEO

This article appeared in the Public Eye on the 24 April 2008