5th Annual Local Government Conversations - White Paper Series, Webinar 4 of 4

Professionalisation, Capacity Development and Ethical Governance

Presented by: Future Cities Africa and The Municipal Edge

Platinum sponsor:Business Engineering

Date: 5 August 2026

Topics: Professionalisation - Capacity Development - Ethical Governance - Competency Frameworks - Training and Development - White Paper on Local Government

This webinar brought together human resources practitioners, professional body leaders, training specialists and public sector advocates to examine one of the most critical chapters of the 2026 White Paper on Local Government: how South Africa builds, sustains and holds accountable a professional local government workforce. The conversation moved from policy to practice - asking not what professionalisation should look like, but what it actually takes to implement it inside a municipality today.

The core challenge

South Africa has a well-designed legislative and policy framework for local government professionalisation. The Municipal Systems Act, the Municipal Staff Regulations, MFMA minimum competency regulations, and the draft White Paper's Chapter 6 all point in the same direction. The gap is not the framework - it is implementation. Competency assessments are treated as compliance exercises. Training spend delivers little measurable improvement. Political interference in appointments undermines merit-based recruitment. And consequence management for poor performance and misconduct remains inconsistently applied. The panel examined each of these failures - and what municipalities, professional bodies and training institutions can do about them right now.

Speaker contributions

Ms Nokuzuka Matolengwe - Senior Manager: Human Resources, Drakenstein Local Municipality

Nokuzuka grounded the professionalisation conversation in lived municipal practice, drawing on Drakenstein's experience as one of South Africa's consistently high-performing municipalities. Her contribution focused on what HR leadership actually looks like inside a municipality that takes performance seriously.

• Professionalisation starts with recruitment. Appointing on merit - not on political affiliation or personal networks - is the non-negotiable foundation. Without this, every subsequent investment in training and development is compromised.
• Drakenstein's performance management system goes significantly beyond quarterly reporting. A daily and weekly monitoring and evaluation system tracks every decision from management meetings through to implementation - by name, not by title. Ward councillors sign performance contracts and are assessed against them.
• The SUPLIS programme gives junior staff a structured channel to surface problems upward before they become audit findings. The organisation does not wait for issues to be discovered externally - it finds them internally, then closes them.
• HR must be a strategic function, not an administrative one. People management - including motivation, performance accountability, skills development and succession planning - determines whether an organisation can translate its vision into daily service delivery.
• Corporate culture is as important as any system or policy. A toxic culture will consume even the best strategy. At Drakenstein, the culture is built around three things: being customer-centric, focusing on service delivery, and getting things done.
• Training must be linked to identified competency gaps - not delivered generically. Skills development plans must be built from individual performance assessments, not from available training catalogues.

"You can have the best policies and the best systems - but if the culture is wrong, none of it works. Culture is the environment in which everything else either grows or dies."

Mr Attie Butler - CEO, Ignite Advisory Services

Attie pushed back on the idea that competency frameworks are simply bureaucratic instruments. Properly designed, they are the foundation of a credible professionalisation system - but only if municipalities use them as genuine development tools rather than compliance exercises.

• Approximately 80% of municipalities are treating competency assessment as a compliance exercise rather than a genuine professionalisation tool. The result is assessments that produce paperwork but no meaningful change in capability.
• The fix is not a new framework - it is better-trained managers who understand how to prepare for, conduct and act on performance evaluations. The instrument is only as good as the people using it.
• Competency frameworks currently exist for section 54A and 56 managers - municipal managers and senior managers. These frameworks need to be extended to all levels of the municipal workforce, with assessment tools appropriate to each role and level.
• Ignite has developed an online technical competency assessment tool that municipalities can use to establish a credible baseline. The remaining gap is incorporating behavioural competencies alongside technical ones - and ensuring that assessment results inform development plans, not just HR records.
• On accreditation: existing professional accreditations - engineering, finance, planning - should be recognised within the municipal competency framework, provided they were earned through verified work experience and examinations meeting a defined standard. This requires close collaboration with professional bodies to maintain the standard.
• Consequence management must be linked to competency outcomes. If an assessment identifies a critical gap and the gap is not addressed, there must be a management response - not a filed report.
• The White Paper's professionalisation chapter must be explicit about who is responsible for implementing competency frameworks at each level, and what happens when that responsibility is not met.

"The assessment is not the destination. It is the starting point. What matters is what happens after the assessment - and right now, in most municipalities, the answer is: not enough."

Mr Nakisani Mathobo - CEO, Chartered Institute of Government Finance, Audit and Risk Officers (CIGFARO)

Nakisani represented the professional body perspective - arguing that CIGFARO's role in the professionalisation agenda goes beyond examinations and CPD points to active advocacy for the conditions that make professional practice possible in local government.

• Professional bodies are not simply certifying institutions. They set and maintain standards, provide a professional home for practitioners, and hold members accountable to a code of ethics that transcends their employment relationship with any particular municipality.
• The statutory recognition of professional bodies in the Public Procurement Act and the draft White Paper creates a new accountability architecture - one that can support consequence management where internal municipal processes have failed.
• CIGFARO's membership spans finance, audit and risk officers across all 257 municipalities. The patterns visible from this vantage point are consistent: where political leadership appoints technically unqualified people to financial management roles, the audit outcomes follow predictably.
• CPD must be linked to demonstrated competency improvement, not just hours attended. CIGFARO is working to strengthen the link between continuing professional development, competency assessment and membership renewal - so that CPD is a genuine development mechanism, not a points accumulation exercise.
• On ethics: professional bodies provide an independent accountability layer. A CIGFARO member who is pressured to act unethically has a professional obligation and a professional body to report to - outside the municipal hierarchy. This independence is one of the most practical tools available for strengthening ethical governance in local government.
• Municipalities should actively support their finance, audit and risk staff in obtaining and maintaining professional membership - not as a compliance requirement, but as an investment in the quality of financial oversight.

"Your professional membership is not just a certificate on the wall. It is an accountability relationship that exists independently of your employer - and that is precisely why it matters in local government."

Dr Marisa Labuschagne - Director: Quality Assurance, National School of Government

Marisa examined the role of the National School of Government in building public sector capability at scale - and was candid about both the progress made and the structural challenges that limit the impact of training interventions in local government.

• The NSG's mandate is to provide learning and development for the public sector as a whole - but local government presents unique challenges, including high staff turnover, inconsistent funding for training, and the difficulty of releasing staff for learning programmes during operational pressures.
• Training without needs analysis is waste. The NSG works to ensure that its programmes are informed by competency frameworks and skills gap analyses - but municipalities must do their part by identifying what specific gaps they need to close, not simply requesting generic management training.
• The articulation challenge is real: short-term interventions and capacity-building programmes must link to formal NQF qualifications so that learning accumulates over a career rather than resetting with each new programme. The NSG is working to strengthen these pathways.
• Ethics training is not enough. Ethical behaviour in public service is produced by a combination of individual values, institutional culture, leadership modelling, consequence management and peer accountability. Training can strengthen individual awareness - but it cannot substitute for the other four.
• Induction is the most underinvested training moment in local government. New councillors and new officials need a comprehensive understanding of their legal obligations, their accountability relationships, and the constitutional purpose of the institution they have joined - before they make their first decision.
• The NSG is developing a mandatory induction programme for newly elected and appointed officials that addresses this gap - ensuring that everyone entering local government, at every level, starts from a common baseline understanding of what the job actually requires.

"We cannot train our way out of an ethics problem. But we can create conditions where ethical behaviour is the expected norm - and where deviation from it has real consequences."

Mr Odwa Benxa CA(SA) - Lead: Public Sector Advocacy, South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA)

Odwa brought SAICA's public sector advocacy perspective to the professionalisation debate - making the case that financial management capability is not just a technical requirement but a governance imperative, and that the chartered accountancy profession has a specific role to play in raising the standard of financial oversight in local government.

• The audit outcomes data is unambiguous: municipalities with qualified, professionally accountable CFOs and financial management teams consistently outperform those without. This is not a correlation - it is a causal relationship backed by years of AGSA data.
• SAICA's public sector advocacy work focuses on three things: making the public sector an attractive career destination for chartered accountants; supporting CA(SA)s already working in local government with specialist CPD and peer networks; and advocating for the conditions - remuneration, professional autonomy, consequence management - that allow financial professionals to do their jobs properly.
• Remuneration is a professionalisation issue. If local government cannot compete with the private sector on compensation for qualified financial professionals, it will continue to lose talent to the private sector at exactly the level of seniority where it is most needed.
• Independence of the CFO function must be protected. CFOs who are pressured to sign off on irregular expenditure, who face retaliation for raising concerns, or who are dismissed for refusing to approve unlawful transactions are not an anomaly - they are a pattern. The White Paper must address the independence and protection of senior financial officers explicitly.
• On the audit committee: audit committees in local government are frequently under-resourced, under-qualified and under-empowered. A properly functioning audit committee - composed of independent, qualified members with real authority to interrogate management - is one of the most cost-effective governance investments a municipality can make.
• SAICA supports the statutory recognition of professional bodies in the professionalisation framework, and is working with CIGFARO and other bodies to develop a coherent, cross-profession approach to competency standards in local government financial management.

"The CFO's job is to tell the truth about the municipality's financial position - even when that truth is uncomfortable. If that independence is not protected, you do not have a CFO. You have a very expensive signature."

Key takeaways for practitioners

1. Professionalisation starts with recruitment. Appointing on merit - not on political affiliation - is the non-negotiable foundation. Every subsequent investment in training and development is undermined if this foundation is absent.
2. Competency assessments must drive development, not produce paperwork. 80% of municipalities are treating them as compliance exercises. The instrument is only as good as the management response that follows it.
3. Extend competency frameworks beyond section 54A and 56 managers to all levels of the municipal workforce. Professionalisation cannot be a senior management exercise while junior and middle layers remain unassessed.
4. Professional body membership provides an independent accountability layer that operates outside the municipal hierarchy. Municipalities should actively support and incentivise their staff to obtain and maintain professional membership.
5. Training must be linked to identified competency gaps. Generic management training delivered without a needs analysis produces activity, not capability improvement.
6. Induction is the most underinvested training moment. New councillors and officials must understand their legal obligations, accountability relationships and the constitutional purpose of local government before they make their first decision.
7. The independence of the CFO function must be explicitly protected in the White Paper. A CFO who cannot raise concerns without fear of retaliation is not fulfilling the governance role the position exists to perform.
8. Consequence management must be real and consistent. Ethics training, competency frameworks and professional body membership are all undermined if poor performance, misconduct and irregular conduct carry no meaningful consequences.