Every Municipality Must Work
Thirty intermediate city municipalities. Thirty Capital Expenditure Frameworks. One team that just spent months turning that ambition into a working set of tools municipalities can actually use.
Behind that effort is Nokwenama James, Deputy Director: Infrastructure Planning at the Department of Cooperative Governance (DCoG).
A Capital Expenditure Framework sounds technical, and it is. It’s the tool that helps a municipality line up its infrastructure spending with where the city is actually growing, so budgets go toward the roads, water systems, and services communities need most, instead of being spread thin or misaligned with demand. Getting 30 municipalities through that process isn’t paperwork. It’s the groundwork for better-planned towns for years to come.
It’s also, for Nokwenama, just one piece of a bigger mandate: coordinating South Africa’s Integrated Urban Development Framework and supporting municipalities through national programmes designed to strengthen how mid-sized cities plan, budget, and deliver services.
Planning With Purpose
For Nokwenama, none of this is really about frameworks or budgets. It’s about people.
“I find the greatest fulfilment in seeing an idea move from a plan to reality in our local communities,” she says.
“The real measure of success is when our initiatives improve the spaces we live in and make a tangible difference in people’s daily lives.”
Without that impact, she believes, even the best plans risk becoming documents that gather dust rather than instruments of change.
Building More Than Infrastructure
Infrastructure planning is often measured in projects delivered or budgets spent. Nokwenama measures it differently: in stronger municipalities, better-planned settlements, and communities with greater access to opportunity because someone did the unglamorous work of getting the foundation right.
Her guiding principle comes from Colossians 3:23: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as though you were working for the Lord and not for people.” It shows up in the small things: how she engages with colleagues, how she holds a standard with a municipality under pressure to cut corners, and how she shows up to work most people never see.
Asked how she’d want to be remembered, she doesn’t reach for a title or a project list:
“I would want people to remember my contribution as someone who wanted to make a difference and was driven by purpose to produce quality work at all times.”