Cogta minister Velenkosini Hlabisa
Image: DOCTOR NGCOBO/INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPERS
Two KwaZulu-Natal municipalities could soon be placed under administration due to crippling governance failures that have undermined their ability to deliver services.
The embattled Impendle Local Municipality outside Pietermaritzburg and the uThukela District Municipality near Ladysmith are being monitored closely by the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta).
Both municipalities have battled to pay workers' salaries and are besieged by service delivery challenges, including the delivery of water.
Cogta minister Velenkosini Hlabisa warned that the municipalities are on the brink of administrative intervention.
He was discussing the state of municipalities across the country and the work being done by the government to address the financial challenges faced by municipalities.
He said that the white paper on local government, which looks at addressing the issue of funding for municipalities, is central to resolving the financial challenges of councils across the country.
In an interview, Hlabisa stated that Impendle and uThukela are two municipalities they are monitoring very closely in KZN while in Gauteng, the City of Johannesburg is under scrutiny.
“The two municipalities face challenges that we are likely to intervene in, specifically Impendle and uThukela, because of the problems we will intervene in at both municipalities so that the residents of these municipalities can see immediate change,” said the minister.
The Impendle Local Municipality has not been able to pay salaries for some months, and uThukela is facing serious service delivery challenges. “We cannot have a situation where we have municipalities existing in name only,” the minister warned.
In Impendle Local Municipality there are already interventions underway; there is a team deployed by the provincial MEC for Cogta, and another team has been deployed by the MEC for Finance and will begin its work next month.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) has highlighted the problems in uThukela for the past few months.
DA councillor Thys van Rensburg said this week that the DA in KZN has been left with no choice but to turn to the courts as a last resort to uphold the constitutional rights of the residents of uThukela to access to water.
Earlier this month, van Rensburg had outlined the issues including the disruption of water and sanitation services, lack of implementation of forensic investigations' recommendations and consequence management.
The KZN Cogta department had not responded to the request for comment by the time of publication.
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