​This is an exciting time where the City of Cape Town is nearing the one-year mark of the adoption of our Organisational Development and Transformation Plan (ODTP) which indeed has found inspiration and guidance from the King IV Governance Principles.

Today’s meeting is vital in our work of building a progressive, proactive, responsive and customer-centric organisation and it is for this reason that we have made it compulsory that all senior City leadership are in attendance today.

This is because good governance is not merely a catch phrase or words. It is about action.

Corporate governance underpins everything we do in the City of Cape Town to realise our goals of excellence in service delivery and achieving our strategic objective of being a well-run city.

Good governance is also not just about being compliant. It is about how well our systems work to deliver effective results and to work transparently.

Today’s seminar takes places under the theme: King IV Governance Principles: the foundation for a resilient City of Cape Town.

The City of Cape Town has been a pioneer of implementing the King Code in the public sector.

Our administration has provided extensive input into development the King IV principles and at this time I would like to thank the Probity Department in the Directorate of the Mayor for their input and for being a leader in coordinating the adoption of King IV.

In embarking on this process we want to gain a greater understanding of what it means to uphold the principles of good governance and not just saying it but living up to it and embedding it into all the work we do.

In launching King IV in the City, we have many successes in our work of building a leading city which has become a trademark of good governance in South Africa.

This is evident with the City of Cape Town receiving its 13th consecutive unqualified audit and its fourth consecutive clean audit from the Auditor-General of South Africa – the only municipality in the country to have done so.

Receiving a clean audit is, however, not just about being compliant. It is about a moral obligation on government leaders to make sure we spend every cent of ratepayers’ money where it is meant to be spent.

We take this obligation very seriously because aside from the accountability which rests with civil servants, clean governance is a key factor which investors look to when deciding where to invest their money and open their companies.

Our ODTP transformational priorities include positioning Cape Town as a forward-looking globally competitive business destination.

In executing our economic growth strategy, we work from the premise that the world owes us nothing and we have to build our case right from the core with our governance to tell the world that we are open for business.

In this regard, we understand that our contribution to growing the economy is to invest and maintain sound infrastructure and to create the environment conducive for economic growth and job creation.

This is evident in the City spending R6,6 billion annually on investing in new infrastructure and maintaining and repairing existing infrastructure.

We have now taken this work a step further in a hugely successful inaugural green bond of R1 billion which allows us to scale up our financing to fund infrastructure projects, especially in light of the impact that climate change has on our infrastructure, sustainability and building resilience.

Indeed, the green bond is a clear example of the King IV principles that the governing body should lead ethically and effectively and it should be seen to be a responsible corporate citizen.

Good governance allows us to align strategy and implementation to respond to the needs of the communities we serve.

As public servants, we do not hold these offices to have all the niceties such as clean audits and flagship projects.

I believe that it is imperative that the chief motivation for our work is to uplift communities, to assist those in need, and alleviate poverty by addressing socio-economic issues in a holistic manner.

To achieve this there must be considerable effort spent on social development and as much on economic development in order to alleviate poverty and redress the imbalances of our painful past.

Our budgets must show a clear commitment to our social development strategy which includes delivery of better services and access to services. In this regard Cape Town is the only municipality to also provide access to services to backyard dwellers.

To address unemployment, we add substantially more to our annual Expanded Public Works Programme budget and work with a range stakeholders to attract investment so that we can empower even more residents through skills development and employment.

When we were receiving all the clean audits, about two years ago the National Treasury warned us that this was unsustainable and cautioned that we were ‘overly generous’ with our social package of rebates and free basic services to indigent residents and pensioners.

But in building on our actions to deliver on our commitments, we increased our social assistance packages from to R2,7 billion – up from R2,5 billion in the previous financial year to assist our most vulnerable residents while still maintaining excellent financial standing.

Finally, a key example of the City incorporating the first King IV principle of leading ethically and effectively is that on 24 August 2016, the City of Cape Town Ethics Code was adopted by Council.

The Ethics Code is a continuous endeavour to sustain the ethical culture in decision-making and the day-to-day business activities of each employee.

In the City of Cape Town, we have a zero-tolerance approach to corruption and my message to staff is always that corruption doesn’t pay. You lose an income to yourself and your family. It simply is not worth it.

To further embed a greater ethical culture into the City, we developed and adopted the following organisational values flowing from the ODTP: integrity, trust, accountability, service excellence, and accessibility. 

These values are aligned with the King IV outcomes, being: ethical culture, good performance, effective control, and legitimacy.

I always say that we have done good work in Cape Town, but we cannot ​rest and we cannot become arrogant with power or success.

There are still far too many people who have not yet tasted the fruits of our democracy and as a City we have to do all we can to help more people enjoy the benefits of our hard-won democracy.

We can do this by bringing parity of services to all who live in Cape Town, by exceeding residents’ expectations, and ensuring excellence in service delivery.

But most of all, we can enhance our democratic values by growing the faith and trust that residents have placed in us by building on our good governance practices and living this in every task we undertake as public servants.

Indeed, we look forward to expressing the King IV governance principles into our actions and service delivery across the organisation so that we can take Cape Town to even greater heights.

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