Officials at wayward councils to be hit in pocket
NO bonuses or salary increases for employees at municipalities that perform poorly in KwaZulu-Natal.
This is the reality facing errant provincial municipalities‚ in line with the province’s Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Department’s “Operation Bounce Back” campaign.
This stern warning was issued by MEC Nomusa DubeNcube in Durban yesterday.
She was speaking after municipal audit outcomes from auditor-general Kimi Makwethu’s national municipal audit report for the 2016-17 financial year.
Makwethu painted a bleak picture of the financial situation of municipalities in the country‚ with his report revealing that the expenditure budget for the municipal sphere in 2016-17 was R362.13-billion.
It also showed that municipalities with clean audit opinions represented just R25.68-billion (7%) of this amount‚ while those with unqualified opinions with findings represented R243.82-billion.
But Dube-Ncube said that despite an overall regression‚ the province had retained its position as the second best-performing province in the country.
“As a provincial government department whose mandate is to support municipalities‚ we have wasted no time in responding to these audit outcomes.
“We have engaged with every one of our poorly performing municipalities on a oneon-one basis and we have launched Operation Bounce Back to ensure that all municipalities come up with wellrounded audit response plans that will form the basis for improved audits in 2017-18 and beyond.”
Operation Bounce Back places a premium on consequence management by penalising poor performance.
Dube-Ncube said the department had also introduced a new way of dealing with municipalities‚ which includes “not paying bonuses and salary increases to poorly performing municipal employees.
“We are applying consequence management and‚ as a result‚ we will bounce back”. – TimesLIVE