The department’s spokesperson, Zolile Lobe, says the newly appointed MEC Thembeni Nxangisa, has within just a few days of his term requested for the development of strategies toward addressing challenges plaguing many of the municipalities.

Lobe says key to these strategies is the establishment of Financial Misconduct Boards, which will be in place by the end of this month at all municipalities in the province. 

He tells OFM News that they also acknowledge corrective measures outlined by the Auditor-General, Kimi Makwetu, in his last report on local government and are hard at work re-dressing issues pertaining to maladministration, irregular and fruitless expenditure, as well as a lack of service delivery, amongst others.

In his latest report, Makwetu indicated that all municipalities in the Free State needed urgent intervention. He outlined that their audit outcomes regressed, the state of good governance was on a decline and the lack of accountability had become prevalent in many municipalities.

Municipalities in this province had incurred a total of R675 million in irregular expenditure during the 2016/17 fiscal year alone.

They further owe Eskom the highest amount as compared to municipalities in other provinces. They are more than R7.8 billion indebted to the power utility, with Maluti-A-Phofung taking center stage.

Lobe highlights that besides the Financial Misconduct Boards set to be in effect from the end of June 2019, MEC Nxangisa has requested that a team from Cogta be established to look into the finances of municipalities throughout the province.

In efforts to address questions relating to escalating Eskom and water board debts for municipalities in the Thabo Mofutsanyana District particularly, Lobe explains that the department is assisting with a debt recovery plan where municipalities will be helped with their collection capacity.

“One of the key challenges for the municipalities is that they are owed by communities and businesses within their areas. Now the request is that there should be a debt recovery strategy by each of the municipalities and then secondly to the debt recovery plan, there should be referencing of those accounts - water and electricity accounts being the two critical. Money that comes in for electricity must first be used for electricity purposes, then whatever the surplus goes to the municipality. So, we believe in that way municipalities will be able to settle their Eskom debts quicker.”

Lobe’s statement on the state of municipalities in the province comes just a week after the newly appointed MEC for Finance, Gadija Brown, confirmed that the financial state of municipalities in the Free State continues to be a matter of great concern.

She, last week, told OFM News municipal financial woes, their lack of revenue collection and the collapse of services were amongst some of the pressing issues that the provincial department of finance is concerned with and that they have thus far engaged four municipalities, namely Masilonyana, Mafube, Kopanong and Mohokare on their state of affairs and measures that could be taken to help them out of their financial rut.

OFM News