The audit report of the Auditor-General (AG) for the 2021/22 financial year for the Polokwane Local Municipality (Pietersburg) shows some improvement on previous years, but the same cannot be said of basic service delivery.
It is deteriorating by the day.
The AG found, among other things, that:
• Reasonable steps to prevent irregular expenditure amounting to R718 300 754 were not taken, and most irregular expenditure can be attributed to the violation of the municipal supply chain management regulations. In addition, the Municipality wrote off the irregular expenditure without first determining whether it could be recovered or if someone ought to be held accountable for it.
• Creditors were not always paid within 30 days.
• Water losses amount to R86 994 953, which makes up 34% of all bought water.
• The twelve key indicators used to evaluate Polokwane's service delivery indicate that only 36% of the targets were reached. That is a sure fail with regard to service delivery.
• The conditional allocations from National Treasury amounted to R152 145 962, of which only R16 147 359 was spent. Therefore, R135 998 603 must be paid back to the National Treasury and is now lost for municipal capital projects.
The FF Plus will continue to put pressure on the Municipality to implement a policy for supply chain management to ensure effective procurement management, and to ensure that goods and services are only procured according to authorised processes.
The water losses can partly be attributed to the culture of non-payment cultivated by the ANC, illegal connections, crumbling infrastructure and the Municipality's laxity in repairing water leakages.
There also exists some doubt about whether the water losses were calculated correctly seeing as there are no experts at the Municipality who know exactly where the pipelines in Polokwane's water supply system are located, and many water meters have been out of order for several years, so, water readings could not be recorded accurately.
Polokwane has decayed under ANC rule while its residents are affected by inadequate infrastructure and poor service delivery, which keeps deteriorating by the day.
Polokwane deserves better than the ANC.