Almost 20% of municipalities — the sharp end of service delivery across the nation — failed to spend even half of their municipal infrastructure grants in the 2009-10 financial year. More than R2bn is lying in municipal bank accounts, rather than tarring roads or building waste water treatment plants. The grants are a main component of the government’s programme for sustainable service delivery at a local level.
Many municipalities have been torn apart by service delivery protests that have seen significant damage to the infrastructure that was in existence. Local government across the country has also been plagued by poor infrastructure maintenance and a lack of capital spending on waste water treatment plants, resulting in a slew of reports about raw sewage being discharged into rivers and streams.
The director-general of the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Elroy Africa, in his annual report to Parliament tabled on Friday, said that of the country’s 272 municipalities, 4% had failed to spend any of their infrastructure grants at all, while 15% spent less than half of those allocations. He said that 37% of all municipalities spent all of their infrastructure grant allocations.
Mr Africa reported that R8,7bn was allocated to local government for infrastructure grants projects, and all that money was transferred to the municipalities concerned. But collectively, local government spent only 75% of this, so R2,163bn was left unspent. Only the municipalities in the Western Cape managed to spend 100% of the infrastructure grant funds allocated to them. Councils in KwaZulu-Natal were next best, spending 95% of their allocations, while those in the Northern Cape were the worst, spending 57% of their funds. All the rest of the municipalities spent between 60% and 83%.
The Democratic Alliance’s spokesman on co-operative governance, James Lorimer MP, said: “Whenever there are service delivery protests the government line is that municipalities are under-resourced and services cannot be maintained and infrastructure upgraded because of this lack of cash. The annual report shows it is rather an inability to spend money on things that improve people’s lives that is responsible for the failure to deliver. This inability to spend can be blamed on weak municipal government. The reason for this weakness, in large measure, is cadre deployment. As long as people are appointed on the basis of political loyalty rather than ability, we will have weak municipal governments.”
Mr Africa also noted a further problem in municipal spending, saying that in some cases, where municipalities had their equitable share allocations stopped by the Treasury, they could not fund operational expenditure and as a result used infrastructure grant funding for the day-to-day running of the council. Grant funds are supposed to be dedicated to specific projects and are not for operational expenditure, which should be paid for from equitable share and revenue raised from municipal services and rates.
In April, Co-operative Governance Minister Sicelo Shiceka said his department had audited the backlog in the provision of infrastructure by local authorities and had come up with the figure of R495bn — more than 10 times his department’s annual budget. He said at the time that by April next year the department would set up a special purpose vehicle to control and co-ordinate municipal investment and essential maintenance spending to help local authorities reduce their backlog.
Source: Business Day
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