Minister Dlamini-Zuma fails to pitch at SCOPA meeting on defaulting municipalities

The Missing Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional (CoGTA) once again lived up to her title, when she missed today’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA) which was scheduled to receive a briefing from the Inter-Ministerial Task Team (IMTT) on defaulting municipalities that have outstanding debts to Eskom.

The IMTT, which is chaired by Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, was established to address the many challenges and issues affecting Eskom and its relationship with municipalities.

This briefing and update is of critical importance to the country as the overdue debt at the end of September has increased to R25.1 billion. This is an increase from the debt owing in March 2013 of R1.2 billion. This means that there has been a growth of 2091% in six and a half years in municipal debts.

During the two and a half years that the IMTT has been tasked with reducing municipal debt to Eskom, instead of decreasing the debt in fact increased by 257% from R9.8 billion to the massive R25.1 billion that it currently is.

Given the current context of renewed rolling blackouts, the problems being experienced at Medupi and the loss of critical staff, as well as the Special Appropriations Bill which will be debated in the National Assembly this afternoon, it is thus of the greatest concern that Minister Dlamini-Zuma saw fit not to attend the briefing this morning and instead, at a late stage, sent apologies.

Her failure to appear before the Committee, not only indicates a complete lack of urgency or commitment to resolving the issue of outstanding debt to Eskom but has also resulted in fruitless and wasteful expenditure as the meeting could not continue in her absence despite the presence of other relevant stakeholders.

The DA will now be bringing a Motion Without Notice to the National Assembly to hold Minister Dlamini-Zuma personally liable for the wasted travel and accommodation costs of the Eskom, CoGTA and SALGA delegations most of whom traveled from Gauteng for the meeting that didn’t happen.

The AWOL Minister has once again evaded accountability. Last week, the DA revealed that Minister Dlamini-Zuma has only attended one of the six CoGTA Parliamentary meetings she was expected to attend and that she has failed to give substantial responses to many of the opposition’s Parliamentary questions posed to her.

If the Minister in charge of holding delinquent municipalities to account is evading accountability, how can we ever expect these municipalities to get their houses in order?

Statement issued by Benedicta Van Minnen MP - DA Member of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, 22 October 2019