'We will do our best,' says Maile as Gauteng municipalities fail to comply with legislation

Municipalities in Gauteng are failing to improve their compliance with legislation, and most of them do not comply with procurement legislation. 

Finance and economic development MEC Lebogang Maile said these issues remained a stumbling block to good governance in the province. 

On Thursday, Maile responded to Gauteng municipalities' recent 2022/23 auditor-general's audit outcomes. 

The provincial treasury embarked on operational plan support and monitoring activities, including activities to improve the financial reporting control environment. 

The department has also introduced new initiatives beyond standard support given to the municipalities to improve the credibility of the annual financial statements (AFS). 

“We have introduced the new AFS accelerator programme, which requires municipalities to produce interim financial statements. The initiative was well received; most of our municipalities took up the challenge to produce these statements,” he said. 

The statements were reviewed by the Gauteng government's AFS review team to identify opportunities to improve municipalities' audit outcomes.

“Another initiative explored was the introduction of the audit preparation workshop where the roles of municipal managers, CFOs, audit committee chairpersons and audit executives were highlighted for the audit process.”

All municipalities managed to submit their draft AFS by August 31 as legislated. They would continue technical support to local government by providing technical astuteness during the audit. 

When pressed if the intervention would be consistent while some of the municipalities continue to change mayors, he said their intervention was not dependent on any situation in the municipalities. 

“We will do the best to our ability as humanly possible. We will continue to do what is required, the laws are there, and what is expected of us is stipulated in the law and we will follow that. 

“We are not in control of the political situation [and] if the parties decide to fight each other we are not in control of that, but we are definitely focusing on the job. We are not distracted, our officials are professionals and they are qualified. 

“It must be understood the provincial government doesn’t run municipalities, we don’t want to run municipalities. Even if we want to we won’t succeed, we will fail, that’s why there are provisions in the constitution,” he said.

The most common findings identified by the auditor-general were expenditure management, unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure, procurement and correct management, material misstatements or limitations in submission of annual financial statements and consequence management.

The department's head Ncumisa Mnyani said consequence management was one of the accountability measures they were looking at to ensure the starting point was about tracking. 

“I think for the first time in detail before the financials were submitted about August, there was a workshop with the National Treasury, Cogta, the provincial treasury and the South African Local Government Association where it was clearly articulated.

“It was about educating the role players from a governance point of view about their responsibilities and I think we saw internal audit and audit committees putting in more effort in terms of how this is done,” she said. 

The department's deputy director-general responsible for municipal finance oversight and implementation, Owen Witbooi, said they have also attended committees “as sort of a soundboard to the municipal public accounts committee in an effort to advise and guide the particular proceedings”. 

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