How Many Municipalities Are There in South Africa?

   
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How Many Municipalities Are There in South Africa?

Life in South Africa in The Apartheid Era
When was local government established in South Africa?

Providing broad local governance for a concentrated population in a given region, a municipality is a political subdivision of a state that contains a municipal corporation.
South Africa has 278 municipalities, including 8 metropolitans, 44 districts, and 226 local municipalities. They are concentrated on developing local economies, offering infrastructure, and delivering services.


What Does The Law Say?

The Local Government: Municipal Structures Act, 1998 (Act 117 of 1998), which implements the Constitution’s directives, establishes criteria for identifying when a region must have a category-A municipality (metropolitan municipalities) and when municipalities fall into categories B (local municipalities) or C. (district municipalities).
The Act also establishes that only metropolitan regions are permitted to form category-A municipalities.
Metropolitan councils have one budget, a single employer structure, and a similar service and property grading system.


What are the names of Municipalities in South Africa?


Buffalo City (East London)
City of Cape Town
Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality (East Rand)
City of eThekwini (Durban)
The city of Johannesburg(link is external)
Mangaung Municipality(link is external) (Bloemfontein)
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality (Port Elizabeth)
City of Tshwane (Pretoria).

Do Metropolitan Councils Have Municipal Powers?
Metropolitan councils are permitted to decentralize authority and duties. However, the Metropolitan Council is granted all initial municipal, legislative, and executive powers.

When was local government established in South Africa?

The 1996 Constitution, which was adopted, marked a new era for local government in South Africa. The Constitution mandated that municipalities “be constituted for the entirety of the territory of the Republic” for the first time in our nation’s history, ushering in a system of comprehensive local governance.

The elevation of local government to a domain of government, which firmly established local government’s autonomy, was one of the fundamental reforms of the 1996 Constitution. A municipality now has the authority to run the local government issues of its area on its initiative. This implies that while the federal, state and municipal governments may oversee how local governments run their operations, they must do so without compromising the institutional integrity of local governments. Schedules 4B and 5B of the Constitution also assign the functional areas of local government expertise.

 

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