Is it working?

Not yet in place.

Actions

To flow from the recommendations in the White Paper.

Are there plans?

The next step is to draft legislation based on the white paper, after feedback and input from parliamentary committees and other stakeholders.

Is it on the agenda?

Falls under the Operation Vulindlela Phase 2 agenda and forms part of COGTA's Strategic Plan 2025-2030.

Goals

The white paper's most significant structural departure from the 1998 system is the proposal to dismantle the two-tier district/local municipality model and replace it with a single-tier local government built around an expanded, differentiated menu of categories matched to each municipality's capacity and context. High-performing cities could absorb functions currently held by national and provincial government; weaker municipalities could have powers stripped and reassigned upwards. The full end-state requires constitutional amendment, though a transitional version – expanding Category A to include urbanised municipalities and removing directly elected district councillors – needs only ordinary legislation. Alongside this, the White Paper proposes a permanent national policy coordination centre, a legally binding powers-and-functions map, a single inter-sphere calendar and binding cooperative governance protocols that replace voluntary, forum-based coordination with enforceable commitments and real consequences for non-performance.



On governance and accountability, the paper calls for mandatory lifestyle audits for all office-bearers, public performance contracts for mayors and mayoral committee members, minimum competencies as a gateway to council leadership roles, and a new statutory municipal professional management association with entry standards and disciplinary powers. Municipal manager contracts would extend to 7 to 10 years, decoupled from the electoral cycle, with "loss of political confidence" explicitly excluded as a lawful ground for dismissal. On finance, the White Paper flags the structural erosion of own revenues and proposes origin-based VAT revenue sharing as a replacement for the declining fuel levy.

The proposal for a time-limited, independent local government transition management body is perhaps the most self-aware: an explicit acknowledgement that the country's problem is not a shortage of policy proposals but a chronic inability to implement them.



On infrastructure and spatial transformation, the white paper acknowledges that R755bn in capital grants between 1999 and 2025 delivered major access gains but created a maintenance crisis – a 2023 SALGA analysis found 60% of capital budgets should now go to asset renewal. Key proposals are: simplify section 78 so that external operators, management contracts, PPPs and regional shared-service arrangements become genuinely workable, with minimum contract periods to reduce churn; ring-fence trading services as professionalised enterprises with cost-reflective, independently regulated tariffs to restore transparency and unlock private capital; make the District Development Model a binding municipal-led spatial compact, committing all three spheres to a shared spatial logic through enforceable area-based compacts with sequenced pipelines and named budgets; introduce a one-window approvals system processing land-use, environmental and engineering permits in parallel; enable below-market release of well-located public land to achieve spatial outcomes; reframe the municipal contribution to economic growth as an operating-system outcome – service reliability, approval turnaround times, supplier payment discipline ; and make climate-risk screening enforceable in development and infrastructure investment decisions, with ecological infrastructure treated as core municipal assets requiring maintenance budgets.

References

• Reference Link One

Departments / Govt Institutions

Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs