Municipality winning fight to improve

MALALANE – The Nkomazi Local Municipality’s hard work in improving both its management of finances and service delivery over the past couple of years was rewarded with several awards at provincial and national level recently.

The municipality received the Most-improved Municipality Award for the 2014/15 financial year, in terms of municipal audit concerns, at The Chartered Institute of Government Finance Audit and Risk Officers’ Clean Administration Awards in Durban last month.

At the provincial conference of the South African Local Government Association (Salga), the municipality received several awards including Most-improved Municipality, Corporate Social Investment Coordination and Most-improved Audit Outcomes for 2014/15.

“We’ve gone from a bad situation in 2012, when we received a ‘disclaimer of opinion’ from the Auditor-General, to an ‘unqualified opinion with emphasis on matter items’,” communications manager, Mr Cyril Ripinga stated.

After the poor audit result the municipality had a change in management, did introspection and started planning on how to improve.

The next year, it received a “qualified opinion”. This was followed by another “qualified opinion” and last year’s “unqualified opinion”.

“Our finances are now clean. Money cannot just disappear. There is also no such thing as fruitless and wasteful expenditure. We have a healthy bank balance,” Ripinga explained.

At one point the municipality owed Eskom about R57 million. This has been paid off.
Ripinga stated that the improvements were due to hard work and the support of a hands-on mayor and great acting chief financial officer (CFO).

“We’re very happy about the awards but our goal is to get a 100 per cent clean audit,” said acting CFO, Mr Sipho Matsaba.

The equitable share of taxes and grants from national government is currently the municipality’s main source of revenue, but this is based on population numbers from the census and does not include foreigners. “We have foreigners from Swaziland and Mozambique flocking to our municipality for a better life, and this affects service delivery,” Ripinga stated.

“Our other revenue is only coming from towns such as Marloth Park, Komatipoort and Malalane.” Municipal manager, Mr Dan Ngwenya, said that they have seen a drastic improvement in service delivery.

“We are spending R100 million on projects such as constructing bulk-line and water-reticulation systems. Now that the services are there, people in the villages need to start paying for them,” said Ngwenya.

He cited illegal connections and the theft of transformers and power cables as some of the serious problems that regularly hamper service delivery.

“We have to maintain the water pipes and fix the damage of illegal collection and also replace stolen items.”

For more information on how the municipality is spending its money and its performance over the past few years, visit www.municipalmoney.gov.co.za.