Upcoming events: Brown Bag Series

The Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance invites you to join us in deepening our engagement with key policy questions and challenges of practice through participating in a Brown Bag Lunch series designed to interrogate topics important to public leadership and development. These discussions will shape the School’s work.

Our second brown bag for 2020 will focus on ‘What priority actions are needed to improve the performance of local government?’

South Africa has an expansive body of legislation intended to ensure good local governance is sound and in place. However, throughout our democracy and the new dispensation, local government has been criticized repeatedly for poor performance. According to the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, the quality of management is key to improving performance, productivity and service delivery within the public sector. 

Priority actions to improve the performance of local government is a matter of particular concern, especially as the local sphere of government is at the forefront of South Africa’s developmental agenda, and has clear developmental obligations under the Constitution.  Therefore, in framing responses to service delivery failures, actions need to include the establishment of sound policies as well as prioritise the strengthening of leadership, up-skill managers and related staff members, and define clear lines of accountability.

You are invited to contribute your knowledge and experience to the conversation. The session will include a presentation by Dr Andrew Siddle, a public governance and policy consultant, who serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the College of Accounting (UCT) and a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Business (UCT).  Ms Whitney Prins, a performance management officer from the Drakenstein Municipality will share experiences as an official within local government.

The Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance 
Date: 27 February 2020
Time: 12h30 – 14h00
Venue: Linkoping House, 27 Burg Road, Rondebosch
RSVP: Wendy.Hendricks@uct.ac.za