-ANC-led Emfuleni fails to spend COGTA and Treasury funds
-They have a history of grant underspending and weak municipal grant implementation
-R1 billion has been withheld from Emfuleni as a result
The ANC-led Emfuleni was supposed to appear before Parliament last week to account for failing to spend COGTA and Treasury funds.
Instead, in yet another cowardly retreat from accountability, they failed to appear before Parliament.
Emfuleni’s failure to spend funds meant to deliver basic services is financial chaos, and it is precisely the kind of chaos voters can vote against.
Between 2020/21 and 2024/25, R1 billion has been withheld from Emfuleni because the Government cannot trust it to spend it, or spend it properly.
The municipality shows a history of grant underspending and weak municipal grant implementation.
In particular, the municipality has a pattern of significant underspending using the Municipal Infrastructure Grant.
Despite crumbling services, the municipality has repeatedly failed to spend and has subsequently returned tens of millions of Rands in Municipal Infrastructure Grants (MIG) to the National Treasury due to low expenditure and a failure to submit new projects
This challenges the common misconception that there is not enough money to address some of the issues in Emfuleni, and instead shows that the problem largely stems from the ANC’s incompetence.
This makes the difficult conditions residents are continually forced to endure even more frustrating, since the right leadership could have partly prevented them.
The money was there, and residents could have been helped, but they deliberately were not; the money was returned, and faces turned away.
This is a disgraceful abdication of responsibility by the ANC-led municipality, with consequences that are devastating to the well-being of the residents they claim to serve.
This betrayal of the people of Emfuleni is indefensible, as residents are denied basic service delivery and money remains unspent.
If elected to govern, in line with our Manifesto 2026, I will begin building corruption-free, professional municipalities by appointing competent people based on merit, not political connections, to ensure infrastructure funds serve their intended purpose.
Reliable infrastructure will also help connect residents to jobs and attract investment.
We need to stop the chaos and start service delivery.