South Africans have seen an improvement in the performance of local government aside from Cape Town and Buffalo City, according to an Ipsos survey conducted after the local government elections on August 3.
The Khayabus study, for which 3 598 South Africans 15 years and older answered questions, was conducted from 21 April to 22 May 2017.
Head of Public Affairs and political analyst at Ipsos Mari Harris says in the six-monthly Government Performance Barometer, questions are asked about the performance of local authorities as well as about the delivery of basic services.
Buffalo City has shown a significant decline, suggesting that there might be a total breakdown between residents and their local government.
It further indicated that four metropolitan areas controlled by the DA are the best performers overall, as rated by the residents.
The Democratic Alliance together with its coalition partners and other cooperating parties took over the Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay metros from the ANC following the most recent local government elections.
However, the metropolitan councils of Mangaung and Ekurhuleni are not lagging far behind currently; and Ethekwini also showed a remarkable improvement of 15 percentage points over the last year.
Ekurhuleni residents rate their local authority consistently high for service delivery, outperforming all the other metros by a large margin on this issue.
The scores for Tshwane and Johannesburg indicate a steady improvement, especially since the end of last year, with scores in Mangaung and Cape Town slowly slipping, while eThekwini, Nelson Mandela Bay and Buffalo City can improve.
Ipsos says the methodology used ensured that the results are representative of the views of the universe and that findings can be weighted and projected to the universe – i.e. South Africans 15 years and older. In the final analysis, the results were filtered by potential voters, i.e. those 18 years and older.
