The North West Government has placed eight municipalities under mandatory intervention in line with section 139 (5) (a) and (c) of the Constitution and section 139 of the Municipal Finance Management Act.
The aim of the intervention is to strengthen municipal finance recovery plans, amongst others, for those municipalities that are in financial distress. This was announced by MEC for Cooperative Governance, Human Settlements and Traditional Affairs, Nono Maloyi during a media conference in Mahikeng.
Several municipalities in the province are experiencing challenges which impact their ability to render services to communities. This is according to the North West government which has met with the affected municipalities about the intervention. The provincial government says these municipalities are facing financial woes.
“Those municipalities are, Naledi, Dr Ruth Mompati, Madibeng, Kgetleng Revier, Ramotshere and Tswaing. We also added Ditsobotla and Mahikeng in order to ensure this intervention does also respond to challenges that we know of. The provincial government is implementing mandatory intervention, adopted the following principles to ensure that all affected stakeholders understand and fully embrace the intervention where role player engagement and activation process, strengthening the municipal finance recovery services and transparency and participation,” says Maloyi.
The Provincial Treasury department says financial recovery needs to be a priority. As the Constitution’s section 139 intervention is seemingly not yielding the expected results.
“We need to impose financial recovery because we can continuously impose section 139, the discretionary one that we used to do and not yield positive results that expected because municipalities in the province are in financial crisis. So, we need to get into rebuilding, reconstructing budgetary or finance department of municipalities and part of that is to do analysis look into qualifications, the staff compliments to those who need, and we realised we really need to go in with a multi-disciplinary team,” says MEC for Finance Motlalepula Rosho.
Meanwhile, the provincial government has returned an astonishing R1 billion in unspent conditional grants for 2021/2022 to Treasury. This included the unused municipal infrastructure grant. About R600 million was approved to be rolled over. Opposition parties in the provincial legislature say this is unacceptable.
“Looking at villages that do not have clinics and hospitals and they lost the grants that supposed to be building that. Public Works lost for the provincial maintenance road maintenance grant. The states of our roads, we all know how bad it is so one cannot apprehend how a department cannot spend on maintenance. Agriculture, there’s been so many disasters in the province. Farmers are crying daily,” says Freddy Sonakile, DA Caucus Leader: NWPL
“This is due to incompetence of officials and deliberate transgression of supply chain management policies, which affects negatively service delivery in the province. Hence, we call for the removal of the premier and the implementation of consequence management across all departments,” Primrose Bogatsu, EFF NWPL.
The provincial government says more rollover requests will be submitted before budget adjustments.
