You wouldn’t know it, but Makhanda, the Eastern Cape town formerly known as Grahamstown, isn’t even in one of the worst municipalities in the country. This week, it hosted the 45th National Arts Festival, an 11-day event attracting 200,000 visitors into which the government ploughs R17m, while another R10m comes from the National Lottery.
But it was something of a miracle that it went off without a hitch: it took a last-minute court application by the Grahamstown Business Forum to stop Eskom shutting off electricity to the municipality for a R44m debt. And that’s apart from the town’s incipient water crisis. Even if the taps aren’t dry, the visitors will have surely noticed the decay. Potholes are rife, many streetlights don’t work, and there’s a pervasive sense of small-town entropy everywhere.
Refilwe Murongwana, an economics honours student who has been surveying visitors in recent days to assess the festival’s economic impact, says there have been plenty of complaints. "Many people highlighted the infrastructure: potholes need to be fixed and many lights don’t work, so it’s not safe to walk at night," she told the FM.
Mzukisi Mpahlwa, the mayor of the Makana municipality within which Makhanda falls, tried his best to reassure everyone. "We have put great effort into ensuring that we take all the necessary precautionary measures to see to it that there are no interruptions in services during the festival," he said.
Sure, but what about afterwards, you wonder. It’s one thing to protect a festival that brings R370m into the province, but what about providing services to residents and taxpayers the rest of the time?
It’s an apposite question in light of auditor-general Kimi Makwetu’s local government audit results last week, which sketched a portrait of a wasteland of incompetence, looting and zero accountability.
Of 257 municipalities, just 18 (under 10%) got clean audits, while "irregular expenditure" amounted to R25.2bn. Makwetu added: "Only 19% of the municipalities could give us financial statements without material misstatements." In 74% of municipalities, officials didn’t bother probing claims of misconduct or fraud. Money, it seems, has a habit of vanishing when put into the hands of the people we flatter with the title "municipal manager".
It’s one thing to protect a festival that brings R370m into the province, but what about the rest of the time?
Makwetu cited an example from the province formerly run by Ace Magashule, the Free State. There, the Metsimaholo municipality spent R21.7m on a new sports complex, and all it got for that was a fence.
Makana, with its brittle and crumbling roads, and stop-start water supply, received a qualified audit. Its financials contained "material misstatements or limitations" and the information was "not reliable". Never mind the R104.9m in "unauthorised expenditure".
Tony Lankester, the former SAfm presenter and one-time Old Mutual spokesperson, is now CEO of the NFA. He studied journalism at Rhodes University in 1993, and has for a number of years been living in the town again.
"As a resident, it’s a source of frustration. I’ve been living in the middle-class area, the west part of the city, and people in the eastern side feel it more because service delivery there is really poor," he says.
But Lankester says this hasn’t impacted ticket sales — yet. "By the end of Monday, we’ll be about 4%-5% ahead of where we were last year," he says.
As a nonprofit entity, this means the festival is on track to cover its R32m in costs. That’s important, since any drop off in sales would ultimately mean there’s less money to distribute to artists.
Lankester’s view is that this isn’t a new problem. "These are small-town-in-SA problems. And small-town SA does need to receive attention right across the country," he says. But Makhanda, partly because so many journalists studied there, tends to get an outsize amount of media attention.
It’s true that many municipalities are in far worse condition.
But until the political parties that run those municipalities (mostly the ANC, but no party is exempt) get serious about removing the bloodsucking incompetents who are ruining small-town SA, it’s going to remain a black hole into which R380bn is sunk.
Perhaps if the municipal managers stood personally liable for qualified audits, or faced the prospect of jail for not acting on fraud, it might force them to care. And then we wouldn’t face the prospect of small towns losing what few economic opportunities they’re hustling for.
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