Strategic engagements towards desired service delivery levels
SEKHUKHUNE – Sekhukhune District Municipality (SDM) held the section 79 committee strategic planning session on Wednesday, 8 June 2022 at the Bela-Bela Aventura Resort to with the aim to prepare and plan for a district which is performing well in its required functional areas.
Speaking during the session, SDM Executive Mayor, Julia Mathebe, said emphasized that to realize that vision, there was a need to build local democracy by developing strategies and mechanisms to continuously engage with the electorate.
Mayor Mathebe stressed that as the 5th administrative council, they needed to introduce change that is founded on good principles and that the outcome of the strategic plan must highlight the new imperatives and challenges that confronted communities and playing oversight on those would help improve the situation.
Mathebe highlighted that councilors were defined as architects because they have to set and develop the vision for the municipality and that managers, as builders, have to ensure that the vision is realized.
“In that respect, after our term of council concludes, we must not feel ashamed. We must ensure that strategic choices and objectives we make now, today at this gathering would yield positive results to our communities. We have to excel in whatever we do. In order to achieve positive results, we should collectively contribute towards our strategic development path. We all know that we plenty of challenges in our municipality,” noted Mathebe.
She said that the challenges should be confronted head-on with the velocity of a bull and that failure to do so would create pitfalls that would be too great to overcome, where in some instances the municipality would be rejected by the same communities that voted to be served.
Mathebe informed that the main purpose of a section 79 committee was to play an oversight and an accountability role on the executive.
“Measuring how public spending has been in reaching desired outcomes requires identifying appropriate indicators of impact and collecting as well as collecting, and correctly interpreting the progress of projects to meet the needs of our people. I am optimistic that this strategic planning will produce effective mechanisms to monitor and measure the public spending in order to achieve the impact of changing people’s social economic status,” added Mathebe.
The 79 oversight committee on Integrated Development Planning (IDP) plays an essential role in ensuring service delivery objectives contained in 2022/2023 financial year as adopted by council on 30 May 2022.
