Johannesburg — THE continued meltdown of municipal systems is deeply troubling. Local government provides, or should provide, some of the most essential public services: water, sanitation, electricity, roads, recreation facilities, and the settlements in which people must create their homes.

National political leaders living in major metropolitan areas often underestimate the human impact of the relentless blackouts, overflowing sewers, substandard housing projects, and endemic corruption found in so many local communities.

Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Sicelo Shiceka last week announced a welcome expansion of anti-fraud programmes with his 2014 Clean Audit Project. Seconded officials will tour municipalities and engage with poorly performing accounting officers. The Hawks will supposedly crack down on those who attract adverse auditors' opinions.

But the Clean Audit Project does not move much beyond symptoms to address the underlying causes of the local government crisis. First, successive governments have made crazy demands upon municipal systems. The provision of "free" water, "free" electricity and local economic development are impossible burdens for poor municipalities to shoulder. National government should tailor local policies to the resources that can be made available for their implementation or it should itself ensure that necessary additional resources can be found.

Second, the management systems and skills bases of small towns and district municipalities either never really existed or have all but collapsed. Few local authorities boast the ideal triumvirate of an autonomous municipal manager, an experienced chief engineer and a qualified financial officer. Two meticulously researched volumes published by the South African Institute of Civil Engineers demonstrate that engineer numbers have fallen while the tasks they are called upon to perform have dramatically grown. Just three civil engineering professionals now serve every 100000 people, as against 21 in the late 1980s.

Municipal engineering departments can no longer handle the entire project cycle and their artisan training programmes have been wound down. Sew age and water systems are moving towards crisis, poor roads increasingly cut citizens off from schools and clinics, and long- term planning and investment in economic infrastructure have all but evaporated.

There is a pressing need to build municipal engineering and finance departments from the bottom up, and to create a career structure to attract fresh blood into local government administration. Bursaries and teaching support in higher education are one important part of the solution, but skills and capabilities can only be built by supervised work experience. Controversial solutions, such as the recruitment of retired professionals to mentor younger staff, will need to be tried. The alternative is a spread of the poverty, water-borne disease and collapsing transport systems already evident in some of the poorest-performing municipalities.

Third, the paralysing politicisation and associated corruption of municipal administration needs to be curtailed. The Municipal Systems Act allows a mayor to govern in secret with a hand-picked executive committee. The African National Congress (ANC) has encouraged its local political leaders to make full use of this mechanism.

A decade ago, old-school town managers were cast as the enemies of transformation, preoccupied only with maintaining whites' municipal services. Elected ANC mayors meanwhile laboured under intense pressure to deliver houses, water and sanitation to communities who had nothing. The exclusion of municipal managers and engineers from key decisions for a decade, however, has now resulted in a devastating neglect of bulk services, maintenance, and infrastructure investment.

The white diehards are long-gone, but executive mayors continue to drive out black and white municipal managers and engineers alike, for their own sometimes nefarious reasons. Scrupulous and experienced officials are replaced by compliant youngsters, who are unable to resist councillors' abuses of power.

The tendency for politicians to sit on official committees, and to rig tenders to their own benefit, resulted in 2004 in the government's restoration of the sole power to adjudicate tenders to officials. Villainous councillors, however, have found ways to circumvent this legislation, and they have redoubled their efforts to retain only compliant officials in their fiefdoms. Now the ANC is deploying some of the most unappealing and unqualified local politicians as municipal managers.

The ANC has tried to manage the municipal crisis internally but it has comprehensively failed to create the necessary checks and balances. Executive mayors should no longer be permitted to govern behind closed doors and to ignore the advice of professional managers, finance officers and engineers.

Butler teaches politics at Wits University.