Resistance to SPLUMA: The “exclusion” of traditional leaders from the Municipal Planning Tribunal

This article is the third in a series of articles that analyse the five major reasons why traditional leaders rejected the implementation of Spatial Planning ...

Front companies and “ghost CVs” are thriving in municipal procurement

Municipal procurement in South Africa looks compliant on paper. But behind the paperwork, two practices are eroding integrity and hollowing out capacity of ...

Is national government’s approach to local government roadworthy? Vehicle testing sites and unfunded mandates

The law contains many provisions that charge municipalities with responsibilities that are not part of local government’s constitutional mandate. They are ...

Reviewing the White Paper on Local Government: The need for greater coordination and cooperation

South Africa’s local government system, once described as the ‘most advanced in the world’, has not performed as intended. In fact, most of South Africa's 257 ...

Suppose a new municipal manager comes across a procurement contract that was awarded irregularly more than three months ago. Can he or she approach a court to ...

Municipalities play a critical role in service delivery, development and democracy. What is often forgotten in the assessment of local government is that, ...

The Metro Open Budget Survey (Metro OBS) is modelled on the global Open Budget Survey (OBS) initiated by the International Budget Partnership in 2006. The OBS ...

The public has long put pressure on the government to curb the resource wastage at the local level. In a bid to contain this problem, on 7 June 2019, the ...

Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill coined the term ‘BRIC’ in 2009 as an abbreviation for a group of four emerging economies that were growing relatively fast- ...