The auditor-general (AG) is owed about R1bn in fees by municipalities, with the biggest culprits in the Free State, North West and the Northern Cape.
This is according to the chair of parliament’s standing committee on the AG, Wouter Wessels. Wessels, who served as the FF Plus’s head of elections last year, has been chair of the committee since the seventh administration was formed a year ago.
In a briefing last week, he said South Africans did not need audit reports to tell them that municipalities were in trouble. “They experience the dire state in their daily lives,” he said.
“We’re standing at more than R1bn in outstanding audit fees by municipalities. That is a serious threat to the continued functioning of the AG.” He says the committee will meet the Special Investigating Unit soon to discuss outstanding cases.
He tells the FM that consequence management is vital for accountability. When a municipality is audited, it must pay for it. “If a municipality does not even submit annual financial statements for four years, you can’t expect service delivery.”
If a municipality does not even submit annual financial statements for four years, you can’t expect service delivery
— Wouter Wessels
Wessels says almost half of the debt owed to the AG is older than 120 days. Record-keeping, he says, should not be that difficult. “In most cases, it’s financially struggling municipalities. The problem is you don’t want to take from a municipality’s funding [meant] for service delivery. Residents suffer.”
He says the committee engaged with the National Treasury last year and believes there has been progress. “You can’t have a situation where the AG lacks funding because it’s solely dependent on audit fees. This is very important to address and to see to it that there are memorandums of understanding and agreements put in place to resolve that.”
He says further engagements with the Treasury are planned for later this year. “We have been briefed that certain inroads are being made, though the outstanding debt is still a significant amount.”
In October, deputy AG Vonani Chauke told the committee he believed the funding model was appropriate because it ensures that the AG’s office remains independent. Meanwhile, the Treasury told MPs that it was focusing on collecting outstanding debts and exploring a more suitable funding model.
Wessels says being part of the GNU, now a year old, has been a learning curve. “For the first time since 1994, we have a multiparty government … and that does necessitate certain changes from the legislature side as well.”
The budget, he says, is one of the practical examples of where “we are making progress, to say let’s get all these things sorted out so that parliament really is the voice of the people, so that there is scrutiny and multiparty participation, and things are made better in line with the voice of the people”.
He says stumbling blocks and growing pains are natural, but that things are headed in the right direction. “I think parliament is playing its role and adapting, and oversight is happening, accountability is there, and it can still improve.”
He says if it had not been for the GNU, there would have been a VAT increase and there wouldn’t have been a public budget process. Last week, the fiscal framework — a crucial step in the budget process — was approved without the controversial VAT increase. All GNU partners supported the framework.
“From our party’s perspective, we played a very important role in this budgetary process, in the negotiations; we didn’t play cheap politics but tried to contribute to finding solutions,” says Wessels.
He says it was important to have consensus on issues. “If that doesn’t happen, then the GNU will remain unstable and we’ll have a repetition of what happened with the budget. We can’t just go forward without having a policy of government. We are committed to staying in the GNU as long as it serves the interests of our electorate and we can say we are contributing.”
The ANC’s internal elections in 2027, he says, will play a role. “Hopefully, sanity will prevail and no matter [who ends up in the] leadership of the ANC, they will still accept that they did not obtain a majority. And that this form of government is better than including other parties whose policies are to the detriment of South Africa.”
Wessels, who has been a public representative for 12 years and active in politics for 20, says politics isn’t about clinging to positions but being ready to serve and make a difference.
“We have a beautiful country, but we have a lot of problems and many of our citizens suffer because of bad political decisions and incompetence,” he says.
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