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Consulta has released its latest South African Citizen Satisfaction Index (SA-csi), which shows what the average person thinks of their local metropolitan municipality.
The survey measures citizen satisfaction and confidence in service delivery in eight Category A municipalities (metropolitan municipalities) as a snapshot, including: Buffalo City, Cape Town, Ekurhuleni, eThekwini, Johannesburg, Mangaung, Nelson Mandela Bay and Tshwane .
The total sample size was 2,427 random interviewees in metropolitan areas. The samples are representative of the general population of metropolitan areas to ensure the robustness of the survey.
Of the eight meters surveyed, Cape Town was once again named the best performing metro in overall Citizen Satisfaction for ‘Large Subways’ posting the highest score for the seventh year in a row.
Cape Town recorded a score of 66.0 out of a possible 100 in the latest index, an improvement of two points from its previous score of 64.1 in 2019. It is also more than 10 points above the even score of 55.7 for all municipalities and ahead of all other meters.
Ekurhuleni follows with a score of 58.4 and an improvement of 1.7 over his previous score. Ethekwini and Tshwane are on par with scores of 57.2 and 53.6 respectively, while City of Johannesburg (51.4), Nelson Mandela Bay (49.8), Buffalo City (46.5) and Mangaung (38 , 9) are below par.
The data shows that Nelson Mandela Bay has seen a steady and sharp decline in citizen satisfaction scores since 2018, when it peaked at 61.9.
Mangaung’s scores declined to the lowest scores recorded for the index in South Africa, as well as any of the indexes in the 23 international markets where the model is used.
Expectations vs reality
Consultation said that there is a notable gap between citizen expectations and perceived quality continues to widen, meaning that while citizen expectations are increasing, actual delivery and service quality are decreasing.
Cape Town has the smallest gap (-5.5) between what citizens expect and what they perceive in terms of actual delivery, which means that Cape Town is closest to providing basic services from a local government to what its citizens would expect.
Scores for all other metropolitan areas reflect substantial lapses between expectations and perceived actual quality of service delivery, with Buffalo City (-20.5) and Mangaung (-26.1) performing very poorly on this metric .
“In general, the results show that the expectations of citizens regarding the provision of local government services are far from being fulfilled, with a particular concern regarding the trend in the widening of the gap in expectations with respect to quality” said Ineke Prinsloo, director of Customer Insights at Consultation.
An important factor contributing to below-average performance is the negative perception of the reliability of services, he said.
“While metropolitan municipalities conduct standard of living and lifestyle surveys to help them better plan their services, the results of the index point to a greater need to use and optimize data and research to ensure that skills and services are accurately planned and delivered consistently. “
The latest report by the Auditor General of South Africa, Kimi Makwetu, shows that over a three-year period, R4.27 billion of local government spending was fruitless and wasteful.
In total, 91% of the municipalities did not comply with the legislation. Makwetu added that the lack of oversight and lack of compliance-related controls were evident in several areas, including supply chain management, adding that compliance with supply chain management legislation had receded in the past. recent years, with only 2% of municipalities fully complying.
Only 20 municipalities received clean audits and 13 of them were in the Western Cape. In Gauteng, it was the local municipality of Midvaal.
The AG emphasized that Gauteng and the Western Cape were the only two provinces that had made progress in taking care of their finances and providing services. Prinsloo said the Consultation data largely aligns with these findings.
“The results support the scope of the challenges that municipalities face, as highlighted in the AG report, with the low citizen satisfaction scores reported in SA-csi supporting evidence that there is a lack of adequate financial and management skills, low level of local government cooperation, inability to fill key staff positions, as well as lack of political will to ensure accountability and adequate service delivery, ”he said.
“The consequences of the current status quo are reflected in the low scores achieved in the index that points to a series of category A municipalities that cannot provide very basic services such as drinking water, sanitation, electricity and maintenance to the satisfaction of their citizens: the very essence of his mandate. “
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