Auditor General Kimi Mkhewtu announced last week the province did not receive a single clean audit. 

In her speech, to address the province’s poor municipal performance, Ntombela says very serious interventions need to happen with immediate effect, particularly in the local government arena. 

OFM News caught up with the MEC of Finance in the province, Gadija Abrahams Brown, who said that the governance of local municipalities in the province would, over the coming few years, become an issue the provincial government focuses on.

“We will cooperate and work closely with all law enforcement agencies to root out corruption. We will ensure that all officials involved in supply chain management are properly vetted by the South African Security Agency,” Ntombela said in her speech. 

This comes as various high-ranking municipal officials from various local municipalities in the province were earlier this year arrested by the Hawks for alleged fraud, corruption and defeating the ends of justice. 

Many of these cases are still ongoing, while the former manager at the Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality, 54-year-old Lehlohonolo Nakedi, last month handed himself over to a correctional facility in Bloemfontein so he would be able to start serving his ten-year prison sentence. 

Nakedi was first found guilty for various charges, including fraud, money laundering and corruption by the Bloemfontein Regional Court in 2014 for flouting procurement processes at the Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality, where he worked as a General Manager responsible for Mechanical Services. 

At the time, he was handed a ten-year sentence for corruption, with an additional eight years for fraud, a further eight years for money laundering and finally, seven years imprisonment for contravening the Prevention of Organised Crime Act (POCA), which were suspended for three years. 

After he was sentenced in 2014, he then took up the matter with the Constitutional Court, where he appealed the verdict.

OFM News