DEAR Editor,-
Ugu District Council is hopelessly insolvent and the much-vaunted turnaround plan has not worked. The auditor-general, whose job it is to audit government institutions, has issued Ugu with a disclaimer. In simple terms this means that the financial affairs of the municipality are in such a poor state that he cannot even offer any opinion.
Nevertheless, when mayor Ntombifikile Gumede wrote her foreword to the draft annual report, which was tabled at council at the end of March, she stated that “In conclusion, the 2012/2013 financial year would not have been successful without adhering to stringent and tight financial management control measures.”
This statement by the mayor serves to show the extent to which the ANC has lost touch with reality.
The senior managers and officials in Ugu Treasury were given five years from January 2008 to December 2012 to meet the minimum competency levels prescribed in the MFMA Regulations. National Treasury then had to grant an exemption for 18 months, but very little if anything has happened, and unqualified and incompetent people still populate the Ugu Treasury.
The councillors’ code of conduct enshrined in the Municipal Systems Act requires that the speaker must investigate any breach of the code. The annual report shows that four councillors, all of whom are repeat offenders, have arrear service charges outstanding for more than 90 days; and have thereby breached the code.
Despite instructions from the COGTA MEC in January 2014 that all municipalities institute disciplinary proceedings against the defaulting councillors, nothing appears to have happened at Ugu.
The report further reveals that despite the prohibition of awards of tenders to persons in the service of the state contained in paragraph 44 of the Municipal Supply Chain Management Regulations, no less than 35 such awards were made to government employees.
An employee of Statistics South Africa obtained an award of R3.9 million, while a person employed by EC Agriculture and Land Affairs provided Ugu with purchases to the value of R1.5 million. The beneficiaries include people employed by KZN Education, Rural Development and Land Reform, SAPS, Limpopo Local Government, KZN Transport and National Justice and Constitutional Development. One would have expected even slack officials to make some sort of effort to check whether persons involved in bids for more than a million had stated where they actually worked.
The report shows that these awards were made despite Ugu’s supply chain policy, which spells out categorically that no municipality may even consider any written quotation or bid unless the bidder has indicated whether he or she is in the service of the state.
The entire draft report is more than 450 pages long and will eventually land up on the worldwide web. I can do no more than quote a few examples, which may confirm to some extent why the auditor-general has found it necessary to try and bring this ANC-dominated municipality back to some sort of reality.
DAVE SNASHALL
