SOWETAN | Act now on municipal dysfunction

Listening to Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke detail how audit outcomes for municipalities across the country continue to regress has become our annual horror show.

So why do we keep hearing this with no improvement? you may ask. Perhaps the answer lies with leadership.

Releasing the outcomes of the 257 municipalities last week, Maluleke painted another bleak picture of governance at the local level, with only 38 councils receiving clean audits, down from 41 the previous year.

According to Maluleke, municipalities recorded R4.74bn in fruitless and wasteful expenditure, R25.47bn in unauthorised expenditure and spent R1.6bn in ineffective consultants.

She highlighted instability, inadequate skills, governance failures, poor financial management, lack of accountability and lack of consequence management as causal factors at the heart of this unending crisis.

“Local government has been characterised by dysfunctional municipalities, financial mismanagement, council, and administrative instability and crumbling municipal infrastructure.

“This leads to deteriorating standards of living and service delivery failures, resulting in protests. Service delivery improvements will be enabled by capable, accountable and citizen-centric municipal leadership delivering on their mandates to improve the lives of ordinary South Africans,” said Maluleke.

In typical fashion, the government will tell us of their wishful plans and measures to deal with this crisis but give very little hope of achieving them in practice until next year.

The lack of decisive action and consequence management at municipalities pretty much sums up why every year we hear the same story of dysfunction.

All of this is causing so much damage on so many levels that is now long past the time for national government leaders to step up. That communities have to content with poor service delivery, collapsing infrastructure and mismanagement of funds meant to address their needs while no one is held to account is akin to fiddling while Rome is burning.

While the enhanced powers of the Auditor-General’s office to hold accounting officers liable for financial losses due to irregular expenditure are starting to bear fruit, ultimately, we need more political will to stem the tide.

This means all those empowered to play oversight and act on poor performance at municipalities at provincial and national level must step up and play their part.

It’s time that the crisis at local government is treated as an emergency.