Poor financial management in municipalities across the length and breadth of South Africa are impacting service and infrastructure delivery. This is the view of the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA).
Speaking in an interview with Salaamedia on Wednesday, OUTA’s Julius Kleynhans highlighted the ripple effects of poor financial management.
He was responding to the auditor-general’s finding that only 34 of the country’s 257 municipalities received clean audits for the 2022/23 financial year. Among the metros, DA-run Cape Town was the only one.
“If you don’t allocate the right funds and generate the correct revenues, you cannot manage a municipality; you cannot maintain infrastructure,” said Kleynhans.
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Service and infrastructure delivery
Kleyhans said poor financial management was at the heart of poor service and infrastructure delivery. In other words, poor sanitation and bad roads, to name a few, stem from poor financial management.
“It’s got a clear mandate, and that is to provide basic services and provide that sustainably. That’s not the case anymore. Even in our metros, we see things falling apart. In the City of Johannesburg, there’s not even sufficient water for people,” he said.
Two other glaring issues in municipalities, he said, were the lack of political oversight and the lack of consequence management.
“You can clearly see that there’s severe systemic failures within our municipalities. That goes hand-in-hand with very, very weak political oversight as well as the lack of consequence management.”
Picture: InfrastructureNews.co.za
