Rotten state of North West Municipalities

karabo.ngoepe@inl.co.za

THEFT, corruption and tender irregularities have crippled the majority of municipalities in the North West province.

According to a report – the State of Municipalities – at least four of them, Mamusa, Ditsobotla, Maquassie Hills and Moses Kotane, are in a dire situation.

Premier Bushy Maape, in his State of the Province Address, acknowledged the challenges faced by some of these municipalities, particularly the Ditsobotla Local Municipality.

He said they were concerned by the emerging signs of instability in some municipalities.

"I constituted a team of three MECs to attend to this problem. We have a clear and simple intention to make municipalities work for our people, irrespective of the party in charge of a municipality or the power balance in a municipality," he said.

But Maape failed to detail the challenges experienced in some of those municipalities.

He has also written a letter to the MEC of Cooperative Governance (Cogta) Lenah Miga, provincial treasury Motlalepule Rosho and Community Safety MEC Sello Lehari, seeking a progress report on the four municipalities.

In the letter, Maape said it appeared as though the problems and instability of the four municipalities were continuing to worsen. He requested the MECs to immediately convene meetings of councillors at each municipality to discuss and agree on an approach to resolve the instability affecting them.

Maape's spokesperson Sello Tatai said the MECs met with the affected councils to understand the challenges and have compiled a report that will be presented to Exco.

Today, the Sunday Independent reveals the extent of the rot that has brought the Mamusa Local Municipality to its knees.

A highly placed source said the situation was bad in Mamusa. The source said officials and some of the councillors in the municipality were allegedly colluding with banks to abuse credit cards and pay for policies not authorised by the municipality. The source said people were using the municipal accounts like their personal bank accounts, resulting in it failing to meet its obligations.

"There are four credit cards and life policies deducting from the municipal accounts fraudulently," said the source.

According to another source, the finance department discovered the fraudulent activities after paying salaries.

"Salaries were paid, and there was R300 000 left in the account. The next day money went down. Two days later, there was R50 000 that went out, and it was saying ’credit cards’," said the source.

When this was queried, officials claimed it could be the South African Revenue Services (Sars), the sources said.

Upon further investigations, it was found that the deductions had been happening since 2017. The municipal officials then requested the banks to cancel the transactions, but they continued.

"The banks were asked how they could not monitor to ensure no credit cards were going off from the municipal accounts. They tried to stop them, but there were still debit orders of service providers dating back in 2013, which had ended a long time ago, but were still being paid. These are the things that made the municipality unable to honour its obligations," said the source.

A forensic investigation was instituted, but it is alleged that some of the biggest banks in the country refused to play ball as they were benefiting from the illegal process.

"The bank refused to send information regarding who the credit cards belonged to. The municipality has now called on the Hawks to assist.

"The investigation started in May, but the more you dig deeper, the more you find things. An example is an electricity vendor collecting money, but not paying the municipality. Service providers also pay into the accounts, but we are not sure they deposit the full amounts. There is also a service provider appointed in 2017 that litigated against the municipality, claiming he was owed R40 million. Then we discovered that they were deducting from consumers and not paying the municipality," said the source.

The sources added that contract payments also ballooned way over their initial amounts, while employees submitted fraudulent travel claims.

"The other fraud that has been found is in the travel claims. A person would travel for 10kms but claim for 100kms. They also claim weekend work, but they did not log in when we checked the system. You can't work without logging in. This is theft," said the source.

The exaggeration of travel claims doesn't only occur in the North West. In 2020, officials of the cash-strapped Emfuleni Local Municipality at Vereeniging in the Vaal billed the municipality more than R21 million in travel claims. Some of the claims were found to be fraudulent.