South African metropolitan councils are failing to meet the service delivery needs of many ratepayers, with the worst being the Mangaung and Buffalo City metro municipalities.
This is according to the seventh South African Citizen Satisfaction Index (SA-csi) conducted by Consulta.
The SA-csi for Municipalities 2020 measures citizen satisfaction and trust in service delivery in eight categories ranging from A municipalities (metropolitan municipalities) such as Buffalo City, Cape Town, Ekurhuleni, eThekwini, Johannesburg, Mangaung, Nelson Mandela Bay and Tshwane.
The report shows that citizens’ satisfaction and trust in their local municipalities has remained extremely low with none of the major metros managing to meet the expectations of their residents for service delivery.
Furthermore, municipalities have also recorded the lowest satisfaction scores by a far margin out of all industry sectors tracked by the SA-csi.
The total sample size used in the study included 2 427 random interviews conducted with residents across the metros. Researchers said the samples represented the general population of metros to ensure the robustness of the survey.
Of the eight metros polled, Cape Town once again emerged as the best-performing metro on overall citizen satisfaction for large metros. It recorded the highest score for the seventh consecutive year. The Mother City obtained a score of 66.0 out of a possible 100 in the latest index – a twopoint improvement on its previous score of 64.1 last year. It is also more than 10 points above the par score of 55.7 for all municipalities.
In second place was Ekurhuleni, which recorded a score of 58.4 – an improvement of 1.7 from its previous score.
Ethekwini and Tshwane are on par with scores of 57.2 and 53.6 respectively, while the City of Johannesburg recorded a score of 51.4, Nelson Mandela Bay 49.8, Buffalo City 46.5 and Mangaung 38.9.
“Nelson Mandela Bay has seen a sharp and steady decline in citizen satisfaction scores since 2018, when it reached a high of 61.9.”
“Mangaung’s scores declined to the lowest scores recorded on the index in South Africa, as well as any of the indices in the 23 international markets where the model is utilised. What is notable is that the gap between citizen expectations and perceived quality continues to widen, which means that while citizen expectations are increasing, actual delivery and service quality are declining,” the report stated.
It maintained that Cape Town has the smallest gap between what citizens expect and what they perceive in terms of actual delivery, which effectively meant that Cape Town was the closest to delivering the basic services of a local government to what its citizens would expect.
It said that all other metros’ scores reflected substantial lapses between expectations and actual perceived quality of service delivery.
“Overall, the results show that citizens’ expectations of local government delivery of services are very far from being met, with a particular concern around the trend in the widening of the gap of expectations to quality,” the report said.
It indicated that there was a pressing need for metros, in terms of introspection, to find collaborative initiatives in order to review their service delivery failures and to work consistently to turn the downward trend in the index.
According to Consulta, the finding confirmed those made by Auditor-General Kimi Makwetu in his report on the state of municipalities tabled on July 1.