All the municipalities in Gauteng are degenerating to a risk of being dysfunctional with the exception of Ekurhuleni and Midvaal.

This was announced by Gauteng corporate governance MEC Lebogang Maile in his briefing on the state of municipalities in the province.

Maile said municipalities  were struggling with political and administrative interface, corruption, fraud, poor financial management, violent service delivery protests, non-payment of services and huge service delivery backlogs.

“We have noted that most of our municipalities in Gauteng are at risk of degeneration to dysfunctional level except two – Ekurhuleni and Midvaal. Both Emfuleni [local municipality] and  West Rand district municipality are dysfunctional,” Maile said.

He added that Emfuleni was still receiving provincial intervention which has been the case for the past one year and two months. West Rand district was also receiving intervention from provincial government.

In June, the auditor-general released the 2017/2018 financial year report on municipalities. The audit outcomes highlighted a notable regression from the previous year’s results. In the report, only the DA-led Midvaal received clean audit.

“There is a bleak picture emerging in metros, with growing unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure with Tshwane leading the pack…This situation cannot be left unattended and a comprehensive and systematic approach is now required…To that end, we deemed it necessary to establish a committee of inquiry in terms of Regulation 20.1 of the Public Finance  Management Act,” Maile said.

The committee will conduct an inquiry looking at sound financial governance, public participation and effective service delivery among other things.