Over the past few months Makana Municipality has repeatedly failed to comply with various South African laws.
Over the past few months Makana Municipality has repeatedly failed to comply with various South African laws.
Firstly, the Municipal Structures Act for Local Governments stipulates that at least one ordinary council meeting should be held every three months.
The municipality had planned five of them since January, along with a host of other special meetings. However, it only managed to hold its second council meeting for the year halfway through August.
Then, municipal rules of order require that agenda items should be distributed seven days prior to the meeting, so that councillors have adequate time to go through them. However, councillors received some of the items on the agenda only during the meeting itself, which gave them no time to study them.
Additionally, the municipality has a statutory obligation to commit itself to transparent and accountable governance, and to give the public effective access to information. The minutes for the meeting were not available on their website though, for interested parties to see what was on the agenda.
The Council also failed to adopt the Integrated IDP/Budget and Performance Management Review Process Plan (basically a development plan for the municipality) 90 days before the start of the new financial year, which began on 1 July 2013. This plan was only adopted during a meeting on Tuesday 13 August.
Because of this, Municipal Manager Pravine Naidoo couldn’t table the Service Delivery and Budget Implementation Plan before Council, which should be done 30 days after the timeous adoption of the IDP.
During this sitting of council Naidoo also announced that the municipality would fail to deliver its full annual financial statements for auditing purposes to the Auditor-General by 31 August.
