Last week’s fatal and violent service delivery protests in Mangaung in Bloemfontein, Free State, were a culmination of lack of information, fed-up residents and scared municipal workers, according to provincial task team leader Lindelo Mkaza.
Mkaza, leader of the provincial executive council representative team tasked with rescuing and resuscitating Mangaung metro municipality in January last year, said these events started in February.
“Firstly, our efforts to rescue the municipality were not being communicated to the people and secondly, a certain group within the community which had interests in tenders and jobs started stoning council trucks and stopped certain projects.
“Council employees were frightened and didn’t feel safe to go to work and this brought services delivery to a standstill. People started to develop resentment and that resentment fuelled the protest on Monday,” he said.
Mkaza said council was in a state of collapse when they got involved.
The provincial department of co-operative governance and traditional affairs (Cogta) had endorsed the move after the council had initially placed itself under voluntary administration.
However, that action stalled and Cogta had to invoke the mandatory constitutional intervention by the provincial executive in December 2019, making Mangaung the first metro to be put in that position.
The idea was to implement a financial recovery plan.
Mkaza said they identified long-standing leadership, governance and managerial weaknesses and failures that left the municipality in a financial crisis that led to the collapse of its relationship with creditors and other stakeholders.
Mangaung received a qualified audit opinion from the auditor-general for the 2018/2019 financial year. They owed R1,6bn to creditors and had been downgraded twice by ratings agency, Moody's.
“When were arrived here the municipality was moving very fast in the direction where they could have completely collapsed to a point where they could simply not be able to pay salaries, Eskom, Bloem Water and all its service providers, including the municipality can’t recoup the money for services from consumers," Mkaza told Sowetan.
“Their financial management systems were in disarray and service delivery was almost nonexistent. The municipality was not honouring loan repayments to DBSA [Development Banks of Southern Africa], Standard Bank and Absa. There was a long list of service providers that were simply not being paid. It was a mess.”
In some instances, the municipality extended contracts of service providers when they expired without looking for better deals elsewhere, Mkaza said.
Mkaza said their task was divided into three phases - rescuing the municipality, stabilising it and making it sustainable.
“In the rescue phase, we had to deal with cash flow management, to ensure that payments were [not] being made to providers who have not done the work. We had to zoom into financial management and start to tighten internal controls and that worked because we rescued the municipality from certain collapse.
“Council committees started to meet, reports started flowing in and service was gradually returning. We started to collect money owed to the municipality by consumers and even government. It is still a struggle to collect but we are getting there and we are edging into the stability phase,” said Mkaza.
He said they were no longer in arrears with creditors.
Lilly Tsoeu, a member of the Mangaung Concerned Citizens (MCC) which was behind the protest and called for the council to be dissolved and for municipal manager Tankiso Mae to be removed, said high on the priority list was job creation, waste management and fixing of roads.
“Here you have a council member who hires 120 general workers who are not from Mangaung without any budget for those posts. And then you have a provincial task team who have not showed any signs of turning council’s finances and service delivery around since they were deployed here,” said Tsoeu.
Mkaza, however, said the posts were budgeted for.
Community activist Bongani Ntlola said waste collection had collapsed because the council trucks were either broken or did not have fuel. He also said an IT company that supplied the municipality with printers had repossessed its equipment because it was no paid.
“Council offices and libraries now do not have printers. Playgrounds aren’t being maintained and the potholes have integrated into swimming pools,” said Ntlola.
“It was not a deliberate move to inconvenience our people. The uprising was an act of desperation. People here love the ANC but the same ANC is hurting us and ignoring our pleas. Corruption has been happening unabated for years,” he added.
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