Please find attached soundbite in English by Freddy Sonakile MPL.
Please find attached soundbite in Setswana by Freddy Sonakile MPL.
- Not a single North West municipality achieved a clean audit during the current local government term.
- Municipalities spent more than R344 million on consultants while service delivery and governance continued to deteriorate.
- The DA says the next intervention must come from voters, not another recovery plan.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) notes the Auditor-General’s 2024/25 municipal audit outcomes with deep concern but not surprise.
For the entire term of the sixth local government administration, not a single municipality in the North West has achieved a clean audit.
The diagnosis is now beyond dispute.
For years, the Auditor-General has examined the patient. National Treasury has prescribed the treatment. Provincial Treasury has monitored the recovery. COGTA has intervened. Financial Recovery Plans have been approved. Oversight committees have met. Consultants have been appointed.
Yet the patient refuses to take the medicine. Instead, municipalities continue to suffer from the same chronic symptoms: poor financial management, irregular expenditure, weak revenue collection, deteriorating infrastructure, failing basic services, and an almost complete absence of consequence management.
The result is visible in every community across the province. Dry taps. Sewage flowing through streets. Roads falling apart. Electricity infrastructure collapsing. Refuse left uncollected. Residents paying more while receiving less.
What makes the situation even more alarming is that North West municipalities spent more than R344 million on consultants during the past financial year, the highest consultant expenditure of any province in South Africa.
Despite paying consultants hundreds of millions of rand to prescribe solutions, the patient continues to ignore the treatment.
The DA believes the problem is no longer a lack of diagnosis.
The problem is a lack of political will.
The audit outcomes also expose another uncomfortable truth: responsibility for municipal failure does not rest with the ANC alone.
Political parties that continue to keep ANC administrations in office through coalition arrangements cannot campaign as agents of change while voting to preserve the very governments that continue to fail residents.
In municipalities such as JB Marks, Rustenburg and Lekwa-Teemane, coalition partners, including the EFF, PA and smaller parties, have repeatedly voted to keep ANC administrations in power. They cannot now distance themselves from stagnant audit outcomes, unfunded budgets, failing infrastructure, and collapsing service delivery.
If you vote to keep a failing government in office, you become accountable for its failures.
A clean audit is not about pleasing accountants. It is about whether public money is managed honestly, whether infrastructure is maintained, whether services are delivered efficiently, and whether residents can trust that every rand collected is spent in their interests.
The Auditor-General has completed the diagnosis. Government has repeatedly ignored the prescription. Another consultant, another recovery plan, or another oversight report will not fix what politics refuses to address.
The next intervention cannot come from another government report.
It must come from the ballot box.
As South Africa prepares for the 2026 Local Government Elections, every voter has an opportunity to prescribe the only remedy that remains: electing governments committed to accountability, clean governance, sound financial management, and service delivery.
If we want municipalities that work, we must elect governments that work.
The time for another diagnosis has passed.
Now comes the cure.