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The most productive metro in the country is Johannesburg, which pushed Cape Town from the top slot through "consistently good performance in financial governance and expenditure".
 JOHANNESBURG has scored another top rating -South Africa's most productive city, as scored in the Municipal Productivity Index (MPI).
It is the second index produced by Municipal IQ, a specialised local government data and intelligence service. The index quantifies the most productive places in which to work, live and invest.
Municipal IQ was established in "response to the growing need for data and data analysis on local government", says the managing director, Kevin Allan. It uses "official, multi-year data, ranking municipalities on their performance to enable an objective, critical assessment of how well municipalities are doing".
Last year, Cape Town topped the list, followed by Joburg and Tshwane, with Saldanha Bay rated as the most productive town, in 2007 and again this year. Cape Town was toppled from the top this year, and pushed into third place jointly with eThekwini. Tshwane came second.
"Johannesburg's performance is buoyed especially by consistently good performance in financial governance and expenditure where it does significantly better than the other eight cities, whereas Cape Town drops two places because of its poor relative performance on financial governance and expenditure," says Karen Heese, Municipal IQ's economist.
Improved data
Since last year, Municipal IQ has been able to add improved socio-economic and demographic data from the 2007 Community Survey, as well as more recent and more reliable financial data from the national Treasury, says Allan.
"There is a clear improvement in the productivity of South African municipalities across the country, with a few worrying exceptions of rural underdevelopment."
South Africa has 283 municipalities. Out of the metros, Joburg scored 63,5; Tshwane scored 61,2; and Cape Town and eThekwini both scored 59,8; with Ekurhuleni in fifth position with 57,4; and Nelson Mandela in sixth position at 57. Msunduzi was in seventh place at 50,1; Mangaung was eighth with 48,7; and Buffalo City was in ninth place at 44,3. A top score is 100.
Former homeland areas, particularly in Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, are among the worst-performing local municipalities. Nine towns in the Western Cape scored in the top 10 local municipal section.
The MPI measures five factors to establish the productivity of a municipality. They are: poverty and municipal response to poverty; access to a minimum level of municipal services; economic "intelligence", defined as "infrastructure used by residents to participate in the economy"; financial governance and expenditure; and occupancy rates.
Other awards
Joburg has won the 2007 and 2008 Vuna award for the best-governed metro, and has got Fitch's AA- rating this year, reflecting the City's credit worthiness; the best rating is AAA.
A decade ago it was almost bankrupt, but in the past 10 years the City has turned around, because of a number of factors, Allan and Heese told the Mail & Guardian newspaper.
Political will has meant that radical restructuring has been possible, necessary to take the City into the black. An ambitious focus on finance has been evident, resulting in its first clean audit, after 15 years of qualified audits.
"While the city may still have challenges with supply chain management, financial management and governance processes regarding its municipal-owned entities [MOEs], it has worked hard at leveraging and expending income and the results show in that the City spends more per resident annually than any other municipality," they said.
And thirdly, it has realised the importance of innovation. "The City's MOEs appear to facilitate better delivery in rand and cents output, but challenges remain, especially around an aggregated performance appraisal of the City."
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