Municipalities must be saved from siege of corruption
29 October 2019
The Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Ms Faith Muthambi, said the recent oversight visits to several municipalities in Limpopo by the committee, was a cold reminder of the imperfect and messy journey the committee finds itself in, due to multifaceted challenges faced by municipalities that are at the coalface of service delivery.
According to Ms Muthambi, the multifaceted challenges can be summed up as driven by sheer non-compliance with the prescripts of the regulations and laws, and to some extent, with total impunity. She said: “What stands between our current state of the arrested development and a prosperous South Africa that we want to build as it is espoused in the National Development Plan 2030, is the quality of public service to accomplish that objective.”
Ms Muthambi said, the second objective of the committee’s visit to Limpopo’s municipalities was to follow up on the issues that emerged during the committee’s joint meeting with the Standing Committee on Public Account (Scopa) recently at Parliament on municipalities that received disclaimer/adverse audit opinions over the previous three financial years.
It is a common knowledge, Ms Muthambi said, that an estimated 32 percent of the money lost on the so-called investments in VBS Mutual Bank were from grants intended for infrastructure projects in the municipalities.
That, from Ms Muthambi, indicates a serious deficit of the cultivation of good governance in some, if not most of these municipalities.