Gauteng MEC for Finance and Economic Development Lebogang Maile has asserted that greater urgency was required from accounting officers including mayors and members of mayoral committees to address service delivery challenges.
Maile was speaking at a media briefing held at Gauteng Provincial Legislature in Johannesburg on Thursday.
He said internal units and committees should intensify their quarterly assessment of performance information.
“Council oversight committees should hold executive leadership accountable for the implementation of service delivery plans,” said Maile.
This comes at the realisation of how the provinces municipalities have been poorly performing in the last financial year.
Last Tuesday Auditor General of SA (AGSA), Tsakani Maluleke tabled the 2022/23 report and she raised concerns.
Maile said compliance with legislation was not improving and remains a stumbling block towards good governance, as most municipalities still did not comply with procurement legislation.
“Most common findings identified by the AG relates to expenditure management, unauthorised irregular fruitless and wasteful expenditure, procurement and contract management, limitation in submission of annual financial statements and consequence management,” said Maile.
The AG’s report revealed that seven out of 11 municipalities received unqualified audits, with Ekurhuleni Metro seeing a regression back to a qualified audit, while the City of Tshwane registered notable improvements.
Maluleke said ”all players in the responsibility ecosystem need to work deliberately and with urgency to build a culture of performance, accountability, transparency and institutional integrity to ultimately result in a better life for all in South Africa”.
National School of Governance's Professor Busani Ngcaweni, speaking in an interview with Newzroom Afrika on Thursday, said their institution agrees with Maluleke. He said what she reported is what they see not only in municipalities but in other public institutions, where there are similar audit outcomes.
“The problem is one leadership, because without leadership, you can have the best qualified people, or even you can have crooks in administration, but if the leadership is not strong and dynamic, leadership will never know what is going on in the system, unless, until it is after the fact. So you can have a mayor or a mayoral committee that has no clue of the mischief that is taking place in administration, because they themselves, as a collective political leadership in the institution, have not acquainted themselves with issues of financial management, issues of planning, how the audit processes are going in the municipality and so on.
“This buzzword around consequence management, sometimes I feel very uncomfortable with it. And at the National School of Government, we are openly having a conversation about it, because consequence management presupposes that we are dealing with problems after the fact, when, in fact, leadership should be dealing with things prior to these problems occurring,” Ngcaweni said.
Over a five year period, from the 2018/19 to the 2022/23 financial years, Midvaal Local Municipality (under DA) maintained clean audits. In the same period, the City of Johannesburg, West Rand District Municipality, Sedibeng District Municipality and Lesedi Local Municipality have maintained unqualified audits with findings. The City of Tshwane, which maintained unqualified audits with findings for the first three years under review, received an adverse opinion in the 2021/22 financial year. The metro received a qualified opinion in the 2022/23 financial year, marking a significant improvement.
A qualified audit opinion indicates that the municipality’s financial statements contain material misstatements in specific amounts, or there is insufficient evidence for the AGSA to conclude that specific amounts included in the financial statements are not materially misstated. An unqualified audit with findings indicates that the municipality’s financial statements contain no material misstatements.
“Targets not being achieved further affected the adequacy of basic services delivered to communities. In response to our previous year’s call to action, the metros were included the National Treasury’s common performance indicators in their performance reports. However, greater urgency is required from accounting officers, mayors and members of mayoral committees to address service delivery challenges. Internal audit units and audit committees should intensify their quarterly assessment of performance information,” Maile said.
The Star