Madibeng Municipality blamed dilapidated and faulty infrastructure for its revenue collection failure during a meeting with the North West Provincial Public Accounts Committee last week.

Chairperson of the North West Provincial Public Accounts Committee, Smuts Matshe.

The committee met with councillors to discuss the report of the Auditor General. The committee had identified critical issues raised by the Auditor General and demanded answers from the Municipality on corrective measures.
The Standing Committee on Provincial Public Accounts, chaired by Smuts Matshe, held oversight meetings with Madibeng earlier over the implementation of the Post-Audit Action Plan and the functionality of Municipal Public Accounts Committees. The programme is aimed at strengthening oversight and public participation and promoting accountability and transparency in government.
During these meetings, Madibeng Acting Municipal Manager Daniel Masemola stated that the implementation of the post audit action plan has encountered several challenges, which could result in the recurrence of material findings in the next audit outcome. “Irrelevant portfolio of evidence has been uploaded, which further delayed the internal audit on providing assurance on the implementation of action plans, and management action plans do not address the root causes of the audit findings raised,” said Masemola.
Matshe said it was worrying that at Madibeng Local Municipality, only 21 percent of the post-audit action plans have been implemented, and there is no surety about the remaining 79 percent. “There are bigger issues beyond what is reported, and we need urgent intervention from the Provincial Treasury and the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs. We plan to meet all the municipalities together with the MPACs in the province on where they need to present comprehensive reports on their functionality and how they’re ensuring there is effective implementation of the post-audit action plans,” Matshe said.
During last week’s meeting, Madibeng had to answer a number of questions raised by the Auditor General. Madibeng blamed infrastructure and difficulty gaining access to premises for metering and billing problems. Upon a question about how Madibeng incurred unauthorised expenditure of over R300 million and why it failed to deal with it, Madibeng attributed it to the functionality of the Municipal Public Accounts Committee and its failure in achieving a quorum. “This inability has prevented the committee from holding valid meetings to consider reports on unauthorised, irregular and fruitless and wasteful expenditures,” Madibeng answered. I said a new MPAC has since been established and that the council approved the unauthorised expenditure as part of the tabling of the annual report. “Therefore, currently, the municipality does not have any unauthorised expenditure.”
Regarding Madibeng’s failure to recover debts from consumers, which resulted in material losses of almost R300 million, the municipality blamed inaccurate billing, ineffective credit control and debt collection, and socio-economic factors such as poverty. It said the municipality was taking steps to address the issue by improving billing accuracy, community engagement, and payment arrangements, among others.
Upon being asked about the progress of investigations into irregular expenditure, and whether disciplinary steps have been initiated against officials, Madibeng replied that there were no current investigations, again blaming it on the non-functionality of MPAC, and there were no disciplinary steps taken as there was no evidence.