DA Councillors on the Finance Oversight committee in Ekurhuleni
The DA is appalled that the metro has underspent by hundreds of millions of rand in several key departments and failed to spend grants from government for the benefit of metro residents.
The DA finds it inexcusable that, in an environment marked by service delivery protests, the ruling party in the metro is failing to spend what it has and, in some cases, is looking a gift horse in the mouth.
By way of example, the DA has cited the following inexplicable shortcomings in the fiscal management of the metro:
- While the metro is plagued by power outages, often a direct consequence of old infrastructure and poor maintenance, the metro failed to spend almost R300-million of its maintenance budget.
- The Roads Department failed to spend R85-m of its budget, despite major potholes and whole roads needing to be resurfaced.
- The disappointing collection rate of only 90 per cent of municipal tariffs means a further loss of R2.6-billion.
- In the face of desperate poverty, bad debt provision has increased by R94-m, with the metro expecting its own ability to collect debt to be worse than ever before.
- Even the Finance Department, which preaches to other departments on how to spend their budgets, spentonly R90-m of a possible R141-m on contracted services.
- The inability of the metro to contain illegal connections has caused part of the loss of R895-m in the under selling of electricity.
- A further R217-m is owed to the metro by other organs of state, which begs the question: why haven’t we collected it?
- Another inexcusable statistic – the metro has spent only 70,34 per cent of its capital expenditure budget.
- The non-use of a R277,2-m DoRA provincial operating grant and an unspent amount of R142-m from the Human Settlement Development Accreditation Fund is completely unacceptable.
“If the DA was in power it would make certain that every department accurately spent its budgets on time and to maximise the service delivery it offered to residents of the metro, by fine tuning the balance between maintenance and capital expenditure,” stated Estelle Visser, Ramesh Sheodin and Bruce Reid, members of the DA finance oversight committee in the metro.
“The party would absolutely ensure that its debt collection was efficient, so that it didn’t have to write off large sums of money which could be far better spent.
