MUNICIPAL ENTITIES in the City of Joburg will be heading into the new financial year with new leaderships.
Entities play a pivotal role in line with defined corporate governance principles but unfortunately some of them received unqualified reports for maladministration, corruption and malfeasance.
All that will change, if the Mayor of Joburg Dr Mpho Phalatse and her Multi Party Government, has its way. She also described ‘our City as ruined’ due to potholes and ailing infrastructure, amongst others.
Themed ‘The Golden Start’ during its annual General Meeting of the City of Joburg Municipal Entities, thirteen Entities received new CEOs and boards members.
They were announced at the Joburg Theartre, just opposite the Council Chambers, Braamfontein on Tuesday.
The Entities are created as service delivery agencies of the City, with the guarantee of conducting their business free from political interference and at a reasonable cost to the administration and the residents but that was not the case.
Instead they were used as ‘vehicles for patronage and wide-scale corruption’. Today, this nefarious behaviour comes to an end, warned the Mayor.
“We have full confidence in the board members who have been thoroughly interviewed and subsequently appointed based on their expertise and knowledge not their political affiliation. At the appropriate time we will announce the names of the women and men who will play an important role in accelerating service delivery in Johannesburg.
In the interest of placing service delivery and operational efficiency at the centre of their work, the boards are now smaller, with controls to limit the number of meetings to that which is truly necessary for their oversight function,” says Mayor Phalatse
As the shareholder, I look forward to reviewing the progress of the Municipal Entities from time-to-time.
In the interest of our programme of service delivery, which includes building a well-run City these agencies need to and must work, she pointed out.
Posed to her during interview on whether they will follow in the footsteps of the City of Tshwane, on how they intend to recoup money owed to the City, she emphasised that its actually the policy that was initiated by Joburg but chose not to make noise about it last year.
“We began this campaign last year but we did not want to create unnecessary hype. It’s a policy that we introduced and its working for us, and CoT followed in our footsteps,” she pointed out poignantly.
During presentation the senior manager in the office of Auditor General, painted a bleak picture by Entities, which incurred irregular expenditure of nearly R3bn during the 2020/2021 financial year.
He said the KPIs and IDPs were not met, thus meaning the outcomes on their financial reports were unqualified and demoralising staff competence.
“Billions were lost and unaccounted for, and affected fiscus. This meant projects were not completed and deviations were the order of the day,” he said.
The tough-talking MMC for Economic Development Nkululeko Mbundu, minced no words when he said the ‘party is over’ in reference to funds being unaccounted for.
“This thing of party cadre-deployment will be in the past in this new administration, because it led to funds being diverted for nefarious ways instead of developing, empowering and sustaining services to our citizens,” he said.
“We conducted skills auditing when new heads of the entities were appointed and this should boil down to the staff who must deliver services to the citizens of this City. No more gravy train, its gone,” said Mbundu with a tongue in cheek.
Terry Tselane, the walking encyclopaedia of tourism, who is former Gauteng Tourism CEO and former IEC boss, returns as Joburg Tourism Company’s board member.
Image (Mayor of CoJ Dr Mpho Phalatse at the announcements of entities new boards and executives on Tuesday at Jhb Theatre).
