When it comes to South Africa’s more than 270 municipalities, there’s not much money to go around in service of residents, but the fact remains that the wrong hands remain in control of the tills.
Auditor-General Maluleke presented the latest municipal audit results on Tuesday to a joint sitting of Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts and the Standing Committee on Auditor-General. Doing this defeats the purpose of monitoring, and often leads to fruitless, wasteful, unauthorised and irregular expenditure, according to Treasury.
A particularly vexing element of this is that the councils paid R1-billion to consultants for assistance in compiling financial statements for auditing. Chris Hani municipality paid R66-million to consultants and another R24-million to one consultant to assist it to compile financial statements, but has nothing to show for it.