THE DA in Ekurhuleni has expressed its disgust with the municipality underspending hundreds of millions of rands in several key departments and failed to spend grants from government for the benefit of residents.
“It is inexcusable that in an environment marked by service delivery protests that the ruling party in Ekurhuleni is failing to spend what it’s got and in some cases is looking a gift horse in the mouth,” the DA said on Tuesday.
The DA cited these 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, it failed to spend almost R300 million of its maintenance budget.
• The roads department failed to spend R85 million 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 million, 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, only spent R90 million out of a possible R141 million on contracted services.
• The inability of the metro to contain illegal connections has caused part of the loss of R895 million in the under selling of electricity.
• A further R217 million 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 only spent 70,34 per cent of its capital expenditure budget.
• The non-use of a R277,2 million DoRA provincial operating grant and an unspent amount of R142 million from the Human Settlement Development Accreditation Fund is completely unacceptable.
