The South African Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) was concerned at the high municipal vacancy rate, the union said on Tuesday.

“According to the non-financial municipal census conducted by Statistics South Africa, there are over 41,000 vacancies in the country’s 278 municipalities, with Mangaung metro, Emfuleni local municipality and the City of Cape Town leading the charge with the highest vacancies,” said Samwu general secretary Simon Mathe.

“We are not surprised, but concerned, that municipal vacancies remain at such alarming and unacceptable levels. We are further worried that these high levels would definitely affect the quality and quantity of services that municipalities are rendering. Municipal management have continually shown their lack of political will in ensuring that these vacancies are filled and that our people are employed, particularly given the country’s high unemployment rates.”

He said it was not that there were no skills to fill these vacancies. “Suitable and qualified people are available to render their services to South Africans, yet municipalities plead poverty as one of the reasons for their failure to fill these vacancies. Our position is that these are funded vacancies and as such there is a budget to fill them, however, municipalities are instead redirecting these funds for other things.”

He said it could not be expected of 278 municipalities to deliver services to more than 50 million South Africans on a budget of less than ten percent of government expenditure.

“In line with National Treasury’s austerity measures, our view is that provincial governments should be abolished. Provincial were by the way a product of political compromise, a compromise whose objective has since been achieved. This has thus resulted in provincial governments becoming an unnecessary sphere of government thus robbing South Africans of the provisions of basic services.”

He said municipalities had further been deliberately given a scapegoat in the filling vacancies in the sense that they now relied on government programmes such as the Extended Public Works Programme (EPWP) and Community Works Programme (CWP).

Mathe said they were opposed to these programmes being used to render services precisely because the programmes were exploitative in nature and had rendered poor South Africans as providers of cheap labour.

“There are people employed through these programmes who earn as little as R50 per day for doing the same job as municipal workers, this despite the fact that the sectoral minimum wage is R6 400. We therefore call for the direct and permanent employment of these workers so they too can get job security and benefits just as other municipal workers,” he added.

“Our clear demand to municipalities is that they should fill vacancies as a matter of urgency so to better provide services to South Africans and also to address unemployment in the country, particularly among the youth.”