Centre of Public Enterprises director Thabo Mokwena, who served as CEO of the SA Local Government Association (Salga) from 1998 to 2005, believes that citizens should not still be complaining about the poor state of local governance, 30 years into democracy.
Mokwena was speaking to Prof Lucky Mathebula on “the th!nc conversations” on Business Day TV, about wide-ranging issues affecting the local government sphere closest to the people.
Salga is the body representing the country’s 257 municipalities, which are grappling with fiscal pressures, systemic corruption and poor governance terrible service delivery. Mathebula is founder of the th!nc Foundation, a public policy research, analysis and engagement organisation, based in Tshwane.
Mokwena bemoaned the legacy of apartheid’s spatial planning which located black people on the outskirts of city centres, “far from economic activity”.
“To this day people are still moaning about it. [I’m] not convinced there’s been a genuine effort to deal with this. But 30 years down the line, we can’t be still moaning, we ought to move in a direction that begins to closes that particular gap. [There ought to be] viable economies in townships, closer to where people live,” he said.
This comes as the auditor-general tabled the local government audit outcomes for 2023/24 in parliament last week, which showed that only 41 of the country’s 257 municipalities obtained clean audits, an increase from the paltry 34 registered in 2022/23.
The sector lost R17.6bn over the past three years to fruitless and wasteful expenditure.
According to the auditor-general’s report, in 2023/24, 99 municipalities received unqualified audit opinions with findings, down from the 110 in 2022/23. Ninety received qualified opinions with findings (83 in 2022/23); adverse with findings remained unchanged at six; and 11 municipalities received disclaimers, down from 15 in 2022/23.
A total of 10 municipalities had outstanding audits. Of the eight metros in the country, only the DA-run City of Cape Town received an unqualified audit with no findings.
The metros and their municipal entities were responsible for service delivery to 8.9-million households, or 46% of all households in the country.
The metros of Buffalo City, Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane and Mangaung all received qualified audit opinions during the period under review, while those of Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and eThekwini received unqualified audit opinions with findings.
All the metros, except for Cape Town, accounted for R941.9m in fruitless and wasteful expenditure during 2023/24.
In his conversation with Mathebula, Mokwena said stressed that the survival of municipalities was anchored on collecting electricity and water levies.
“When you make an attempt to remove that from the constitution and remove that power from municipalities, then forget municipalities, you’re not going to have a single entity called municipality, they are going to collapse, all of them,” he said.
“The most fundamental this is to not tamper with revenue that sustains municipalities. Those are the financial backbones of municipalities. Once you fiddle with that, you are going to collapse all of them.”
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