ELM already has a huge salary bill sometimes approaching R120 million monthly, and a COO could add up to R2 million per annum, say critics.

ELM spokesperson Makhosonke Sangweni confirmed ELM had advertised a COO post.

ELM is also on the verge of appointing a new Chief Financial Officer (CFO) as well as other top Executive Directors to bolster its management team to give muscle to Municipal Manager April Ntuli’s turnaround efforts.

In the national election year of 2024, Municipal Manager April Ntuli is still confronted by an extremely low performance employee culture at all levels as well as combating  entrenched factionalism and corruption especially at management level.

Now ELM hopes appointing a COO again will strengthen management, consequence management, revenue generation and security as well as service delivery – but the post was abolished several years ago as ineffectual due to widespread management incompetence and service delivery failure.

Not only are ELM staff completely out of control – with very little management oversight and service delivery evident despite a massive overtime bill – but Ntuli also faces declining revenues and a fiercely resistant community culture of non-payment and electricity theft.

Investigaiton has revealed that ELM staff rarely report for duty on time and with time management measures largely absent or fraudulent from the municipality, but staff are claiming maximum overtime and often seen lounging about on weekends and public holidays.

Controversy has routinely dogged ELM top management especially in the financial field with former CFO Andile Dyakala fired earlier in 2023 after a years-long internal factional struggle to apply consequence management to his mismanagement and internal reign of terror.

Dyakala’s mismanagement dumped ELM into massive debt with both Eskom and Rand Water and coming up with solutions to these has taken up almost all management efforts at the municipality to the detriment even of revenue-generation projects such as smart meters.

Metering and waste management, coupled with developing revenue management measures with both Eskom and Rand Water, will present Ntuli with massive management challenges in 2024 – and with an electricity department widely regarded as leaderless, factionalised and incompetent.

Electricity is the main source of ELM revenue by far but municipal leadership, or lack of it, in this department has been especially criticised by the public and organised business.

Metering for both electricity and water will test Ntuli in 2024 with huge challenges evident in especially the smart meter field, seen as the only arena capable of expanding and sustaining revenue growth and combating the meter bypassing epidemic especially prominent with old pre-paid meters.

With about 72 000 prepaid meters of all kinds, including a limited number of smart meters, only about 18 000 produce revenue for the municipality.