Politicians can choose to do the right thing
We need candidates who won’t interfere with the accounting authority of public servants
POLITICIANS across the country will soon be rolling out a South African flag carpet for voters in the October 27 local government elections.
This is an event they hope to exploit to suggest that, under their watch, the local government sphere can still be a mover, a shaker and even a leader on the national stage in efforts to bring basic services and local economic development to the people.
There was an era in which, until recently in our democracy, politicians were entitled to boast that local government was all of those things.
It had earned the right to be regarded as a national pioneer and a fledgling sphere of government that not only aspired to punch above its weight, but genuinely did.
It was during former president Thabo Mbeki’s term that municipalities began to absorb more conditional grants for infrastructure and local economic development programmes, even to the extent of being seen to be making provincial governments redundant in the exercise of concurrent powers.
The ambitious plans pledged at the time were focused on strengthening the local sphere of government with financial and human resources as well as with skilfully chiselled policy and legislative powers to improve their efficiency.
This was not an act of charity, but of self-interested altruism. It recognised that it is in the long-term interests of our democracy for all South Africans to be less exposed to poverty, disease, unemployment, household economic instability, crime and lack of social cohesion.
This could be achieved by strengthening the sphere of government in the coalface of these challenges.
As we know, the state of local government has rapidly gone from bad to worse.
We feel the pain when nobody knows what happened to about R5.5 billion that flowed through 22 of South Africa’s worst-run municipalities last year, the opposite of what politicians said would happen year after year from 2016.
Such financial mismanagement would be extremely painful in the promised corruption-busting era of President Cyril Ramaphosa even if the self-enrichment by politicians was done carefully and to protect the most fragile citizens.
However, the evidence suggests that the financial mismanagement is being executed with a slapdash crudity that magnifies the damage and inflicts the worst of it on the most vulnerable people.
Take, for an example, the case of an Eastern Cape municipality which spent Covid-19 funds on a new vehicle for its mayor.
It is a shameful illustration of the financial chaos that led to R26bn in irregular expenditure at municipalities in the 2019/20 financial year.
In trying to find excuses, politicians insist that the financial performance of municipalities has been steadily improving in the last two years, but that argument conceals as much as it reveals in a country facing the challenge of a shrinking tax revenue base and an ever-increasing reliance by citizens on prudent use of public resources by the government.
Not even Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke had words to explain what happened when she was briefing Parliament on June 22 on the outcomes of her office's annual probe into the country’s 257 municipalities for the year to end in June 2020.
She said that 22 municipalities – just under one in 10 – received a “disclaimer of audit opinion” from her office for that period, meaning they had not provided enough evidence on which to base an audit opinion.
According to Maluleke, in aggregate, the 22 municipalities were characterised by “relative chaos”, with no commitment to any financial transparency.
Of the 22 municipalities, seven were in the North West, four in Mpumalanga, four in KwaZulu-Natal, four in the Eastern Cape, two in the Northern Cape and one in the Western Cape. She said her office had again noted the use of expensive private sector consultants to put basic financial statements together and the yearon-year reliance on consultants to help put basic financial statements together.
The true state of affairs is worse as the A-G's office was unable to complete many audits for the Free State because many of the province's municipalities either submitted information too late, or simply didn't send anything at all to the A-G.
This situation confirms what we already knew, that the pledge to build a strong local sphere of government was more than ever cast aside last year, the Covid-induced domestic fiscal emergency was misused by politicians as the justification for corruption.
The situation also feeds the suspicion that there is no commitment by politicians to run competent and corruption-free local governments across the country.
Instead, we are faced with the reality that politicians in each of the major parties in our municipalities never liked the commitment and neither have their principals who sit around the table to sign coalition agreements after the 2016 elections.
Those responsible for controlling the deployment lists have always loathed accountability and competence in government because it is hypothecation and they hate being told that a set amount of money must be spent in any one area when they have already lined up their pockets to benefit in another area from government tenders.
No government department should have thought it sensible or ethical to mismanage public funds in the middle of a pandemic, and when they are in their last year in office.
In South Africa, we are used to politicians propping up government spending in all sorts of pet projects ahead of general elections, as a way of enticing voter support.
However, today’s politicians in charge of under-performing municipalities are not as impervious to embarrassment and might squirm at the thought of conducting election campaigning so soon when their performance record leaves so much to be desired.
The audit report might just burst the bubble encapsulating false election manifesto promises.
Politicians are swerving a reckoning in Parliament and in municipality councils by arguing that they are not changing the target to achieve clean financial audits, but are choosing to miss it for an unspecified amount of time, a shameless exercise in semantics.
The case that the government is behaving unlawfully could be taken to court, especially now that Maluleke has recently acquired revamped legislative muscle to enforce compliance with prudent management of public funds, but it would likely take at least a year to secure a verdict. Hence the importance of citizens to find the courage to vote carefully in the October 27 elections, only for those politicians on whom they can attach a commitment to a corruption-free and accountable government.
Rather than risk being rejected in the polls or rebuked in court, the politicians can instead choose to do the right thing.
Thanks to the coming elections, here is another opportunity of putting forward competent candidates who will desist from interfering with the accounting authority of public servants.
Restoring the commitment to the target of restoring health to the finances of all municipalities will not undo the damage that the politicians have already perpetrated, but it would avoid a lot more harm in the future. And the government’s stated ambition to be a caring, responsive, and accountable leading institution in our lives will not ring as hollow as it does today.