The Emfuleni Local Municipality which is unable to provide proper service delivery to its residents has returned R56,581,000 in unspent grant funding to the National Treasury.
This is very concerning as the municipality often blames a lack of funds for poor service delivery, yet it failed to spend its allocated funds during the budgetary period.
This money was from the Municipal Infrastructure Grant, which was intended to improve municipal infrastructure for service delivery.
A further R4.8 million allocated to education was returned unspent, despite the extreme need for resources at our schools.
This information was revealed in a written reply to our questions tabled in the Gauteng Provincial Legislature (GPL).
In his response, the MEC for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Lebogang Maile explained that the underspending in Emfuleni was because of the late appointment of service providers due to supply chain processes and poor performance by some of the appointed service providers.
However, the supply chain processes in the Emfuleni Municipality are directly controlled by the MEC’s own office, as the municipality is under the administration of the province.
This is therefore an admission on the part of the MEC that he and his department have failed in their task of fixing the mess in Emfuleni.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) will be putting pressure on Premier David Makhura to reassess MEC Maile’s fitness for office and to re-prioritise the situation in Emfuleni under more capable leadership.
The dissolution of the Council in terms of section 139 of the Constitution has become unavoidable so as to give the people of Emfuleni a chance to elect leaders who can fix this broken municipality.