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Treasury must disclose how municipalities spent R20 billion Covid-relief money

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Dear MyPE

The Democratic Alliance (DA) calls on National Treasury to disclose the details of how each of the country’s municipalities spent its share of South Africa’s R500 billion Covid-19 relief package.

This information should be published on the Treasury website, similar to how Covid-19 tenders from national and provincial governments were published in August 2020.

R20 billion of the R500 billion was earmarked for assistance to municipalities – to relieve the strain of the lockdown on municipal revenues and to slow the spread of the pandemic.

But the lack of collated information, which National Treasury can obtain by issuing a Treasury Instruction, has allowed many mayors and municipal managers to fly under the radar of public accountability.

National government cannot wash its hands off this issue by leaving it to the municipal councils concerned. In rural municipalities with ANC supermajorities the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA) is routinely ignored and opposition councillors struggle to obtain clear and accurate financial reports.

In July 2020 the DA called on Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to appear before the Portfolio Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs to account for the spending of municipal Covid relief funds.

While National Treasury is the custodian of the MFMA, we expect the minister responsible for monitoring and supporting local government to take an active role in matters of municipal service delivery and governance.

The minister having ignored our request, the DA will write to the Director-General of National Treasury, Dondo Mogajane, to ask for a comprehensive account of municipal Covid-related expenditure.

The DA believes that the public deserve to know what happened to the following cases as well as how many more such cases will be discovered if the details of municipal Covid-related transactions are made public:

  1. The Chris Hani District Municipality in the Eastern Cape paid R175 per 500ml bottle of sanitiser and R50 a piece for surgical face masks. The owner of one of the municipality’s PPE suppliers, IC Bane Trade, reportedly has ANC connections.
  2. The Modiri Molema District Municipality in the North West spent a staggering R90 million on Covid-related transactions. Here too the municipality paid ridiculously inflated prices for items such as sanitiser.
  3. The OR Tambo District Municipality, a pilot site of the government’s District Development Model, was fraudulently invoiced R4,8 million for a so-called door-to-door Covid awareness campaign.
  4. The City of Tshwane, then under administration of the ANC Gauteng provincial government, was invoiced R82 million for catering services at homeless shelters. An internal report leaked to the DA indicated that the “charges per invoice was grossly overstated, the food is the equivalent to 5-star executive and luxurious catering”. Mismanagement by officials created a “field of pillage”.

We also want to know what National Treasury and the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs have done to assist the SIU and law enforcement authorities to hold responsible officials to account.

Regards

Cilliers Brink MP
DA Shadow Deputy Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs

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