Saviours or fat cats, asks DA

R894K: ADMINISTRATORS WELL PAID TO ‘RESCUE’ EMFULENI

Municipality owes billions and party says service delivery has collapsed.

In spite of growing concerns about administrators sinking municipalities and state entities instead of rescuing them, cash-strapped Emfuleni municipality in Gauteng has splurged R893 984 in four months on two administrators’ salaries.

According to information revealed by Gauteng human settlements, urban planning and cooperative governance and traditional affairs MEC Lebogang Maile in an oral reply to the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) questions in the provincial legislature, four administrators arrived at the municipality in August.

Two are paid by the Gauteng department of human settlements, urban planning and cooperative governance and traditional affairs and the others by Emfuleni.

They are paid an hourly rate of R2 264 each, in line with Treasury regulations, which constitute 52 hours per month, with each administrator pocketing about R111 748 a month, which works out to R893 984 salary bill for the embattled municipality in four months.

The DA said that this was unacceptable while the municipality faced serious cash flow problems.

It is battling to pay a R2.3 billion Eskom bill and is R100 million in arrears to Rand Water, Eskom and other service providers.

“Service delivery has completely collapsed in Emfuleni under the watch of these administrators, who are failing to rescue this municipality from its serious financial situation … we see no use in having four administrators if this municipality continues to move from one challenge to another with no lasting solution,” said the DA’s Kingsol Chabalala. He said Maile needed to review the work done by these administrators to establish whether they were assisting in rescuing the municipality from its long-term financial and service delivery problems.

Meanwhile, when administrators intervened in March, the Tshwane metro was in a healthy financial position but by the time they left, it was in a worse state, the DA said.

Between March and the end of June, the administrators had turned a budget surplus of R284 million to a deficit of R4.4 billion, with cash reserves down from R4.8 billion to R2.2 billion.

They have failed to rescue this municipality