President Cyril Ramaphosa noted on Monday that the municipal audit findings of Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke are serious and need a coordinated response.

Ramaphosa expressed his disappointment with the municipal audit outcomes for 2021/2022 in his weekly letter to the nation.

Last week, Maluleke released the audit outcomes, which found that only 38 out of 257 municipalities – and only two out of the eight metros – achieved clean audits.

Ramaphosa noted that while clean audits were not the only indicator of good service delivery, there was a clear correlation between achieving good audit outcomes and improving services to communities.

He said it was imperative that municipalities had credible, sustainable, and well-managed revenue collection programmes that applied fair and equitable standards to all customers.

He said a number of municipalities stated that they did not have sufficient funds to implement programmes and projects, explaining that this was often the case because municipalities were increasingly not able to collect revenue for key services such as water and electricity. 

He highlighted that citizens should play their part by paying for services.

“All businesses and government departments must pay outstanding debt to municipalities,” he urged.

He explained that local government provided the infrastructure and services that helped improve people’s lives, adding that all spheres of government must, therefore, work together to ensure that municipalities were able to fulfil their responsibilities. 

Ramaphosa noted that in the past year, about 88 municipalities failed to spend at least 10% of their Municipal Infrastructure Grant, which was earmarked to eradicate infrastructure backlogs.

Another challenge, he said, was that money that was not allocated for a specific purpose was often misspent.

During the President’s Coordinating Council (PCC) meeting in Cape Town, on Friday, the PCC recommended that National Treasury and the Department of Cooperative Governance develop measures to further support and strengthen municipal revenue collection systems with urgency.

As the Auditor-General’s report noted, municipalities were often to blame for their own financial woes because of poor debt collection practices, Ramaphosa said.