AG praises Makana’s progress

Makana Municipality needs to achieve stability in its leadership, so they can hold officials to account; directors must work in an integrated way, and not in isolation, and those conducting internal audits need to be capacitated so it doesn’t need to wait for a visit from the auditor general for problems to be picked up.

This was a summary of the broad recommendations by the AG’s provincial office, which has been working in the municipality for the past week, presented in a full Council meeting on Wednesday.

The municipality has for the second time running received a qualified audit.

Their assessment noted that there had been definite progress in addressing the financial distress Makana was in at the end of the year – and said the concrete measures to enhance and rationalise revenue collection was “commendable”.

From a disclaimer three years ago, when record-keeping was so poor they couldn’t give an opinion – to qualified audits in the following two years, was progress.

The main gaps in this municipality’s accounting records, according to the AG, are: • Records of assets including infrastructure • The accounting of creditor and debtors • Procurement processes • Performance management, with verifiable targets • The monitoring of compliance on various issues.

While thanking the municipal leadership for its assistance, the AG said they must have a realistic action plan to improve their documentation, and that the plan should be monitored by their audit committee.

Two recent issues dealt with in this week’s Council meeting were the repayment of debt to Eskom to avoid power interruptions, and the threatened litigation regarding the landfill site.

The acting municipal manager confirmed that Eskom had accepted and signed Makana’s payment plan for its R53 million debt to the power utility.

“However, adhering to this plan will require a lot of innovation,” Riana Meiring said. “We have to increase our income.”

At the same time, Meiring said, the municipality had to cut its expenditure. The biggest expense by far, Meiring said, was the R12 million staff account.

“We have to investigate attrition and other ways to reduce this expense because it is killing us.”

Already under investiga- tion were staff who routinely earned over 30% of their salaries in overtime, Meiring said.

Other expenses such as petrol and paper were also being addressed.

There was general applause in the Council Chamber when DA chief whip Mlindi Nhanha thanked Meiring for her commitment to turning around the municipality.

In Wednesday’s agenda was a report on progress made on achieving compliance at the landfill site and social services director Mandisi Planga explained that this was in response to the request to show what they were doing with the R1.6 million received from the Department of Environmental Affairs to upgrade the facility.

He said that among their biggest challenges to effectively manage the facility were the people living on the site. Work had been done to- wards achieving the compliance targets.

“Despite the work we did, there have been [setbacks] such as the fire during December,” Planga said.

ANC chief whip Mabhuti Matyumza proposed that because members of the council would be named as respondents if the Makana Unity League were to proceed with the case, it would be in their interest to monitor progress on the site. He requested that the directorate submit a bimonthly progress report directly to the Mayor – a proposal supported by the Mayor – and to engage with the League.

Proceedings in the Council Chamber became heated over the proposed adoption of a report on ward committee elections, with the DA strongly objecting on the basis of procedural issues, and ANC councillors accusing the opposition party of being partisan and seeking to gain control over structures [the ward committees] when they should be focusing on service delivery.

This was in response to Nhanha’s statement, that it was “an open secret” that councillors who held political positions in the ruling party had presided over the elections and therefore influenced their outcome.

Among the other procedural flaws alleged were that ward committee elections weren’t properly advertised; names appeared on ward committee lists that had not been elected in the election meetings; and that the IEC should have been involved in the process and hadn’t been engaged.

There were angry exchanges and on their return from their caucus, the DA agreed to the establishment of a committee to investigate their concerns.