Assessing the ward councillors' leadership characteristics and their impact on service delivery in eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality

Abstract

The local government level is considered as the first level of government that is closer to the people and expected to deliver the needs of the people. The ward councillors are entrusted with the responsibility of delivering the public services at local government level and also entrusted with control of the government resources of local government. The individual leadership characteristics of ward councillors contribute to how decisions are made at local government level and eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality as a big metropolitan in the country is viewed as a very important municipality, which is expected to produce effective leaders who will protect the image of the municipality and at the same time attract more investors from other countries to invest in the municipality and create employment opportunities for the people. The leadership characteristics of ward councillors have certain elements that can easily satisfy the needs of the people if they are applied effectively. The majority of ward councillors who participated in this study had a positive attitude towards the assessments of their leadership characteristics, but some individuals did not find it useful to participate in some of the questions due to personal reasons. Most of the ward councillors indicated that they found it difficult to fully participate in the making of by-laws, primarily because they lack the understanding of the local government policies; while others have lost interest in participating because the majority always make decisions against their wishes or views. The mixed methods approach for this particular study was used because the study seeks to discover human actions, institutions, events and customs with the aim of constructing what is being studied in sufficient depth and detail. This approach is more relevant to investigate service delivery issues in the municipality. A sampling size table developed by Krejcie and Morgan (2011:607-610) was used to determine that 86 participants formed an appropriate sample size for this study. Simple random sampling was used for this study because the whole population and sampling frame were available. The primary data was collected through self-administered questionnaires that were personally administered by the researcher to the ward councillors.