Lesetja Kganyago: Delivering on mandates

Address by Mr Lesetja Kganyago, Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, at the INCA Capacity Building Fund (ICBF) Summer School, Johannesburg, 5 February 2024.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Good afternoon

Thank you for having me on this panel and thank you more broadly for the opportunity to engage with you on the topic of building state capacity at the municipal level.

I recently returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos, where people like me try to convince those looking for investment opportunities to choose South Africa. Davos is a very well-resourced town, and its local government runs smoothly, unlike most South African municipalities that are facing power outages, water shortages and long queues at municipal offices.

At Davos, we talk about the big issues facing the global community. Local government does not feature much. But what happens at the local government level affects people's lives just as much as the main Davos themes, like artificial intelligence (AI) and climate change.

Furthermore, if we had a technology that improved local government capacity as drastically as AI has improved recently, I would say that would be a more important breakthrough than what we pondered at Davos.

Of course, we do not have that technology. What we have is you, the officials who manage municipalities. Today's objective is to discuss mandates with you, and to share our knowledge and experience in trying to deliver on our mandates, in the hope that there are some common lessons.

A mandate defines an organisation's mission. In government, it is one of the ways in which a community achieves its goals.