Myths about Grahamstown are enduring. Residents of other cities may look at us with some pity.
Myths about Grahamstown are enduring. Residents of other cities may look at us with some pity.
A friend I spoke to during a recent visit wondered when, not if, the university would have to move somewhere with reliable water supplies.
There is a tendency to see the city as bankrupt, like Detroit in the US.
The truth is more boring.
Yes, Makana municipality has been put under the administration of the provincial government, and yes its financial reporting leaves much to be desired.
Yes, there is some corruption.
And, yes, the roads need more than patching, and many of the water and sewerage pipes need replacing.
Actually, my experience is that the water supply has improved.
The updates I get on Facebook via the Mobisam FB page show me when water outages threaten and what Amatola Water, which is now in charge of water supply, is doing about it.
Mobisam itself is something that other municipalities should have.
An offshoot of the Public Service Accountability Monitor, it was created to mobilise the community to inform the municipality about service delivery problems, but is equally helpful in informing residents about problems.
This is not to say the city supplies anything like the level of services it should.
There is still a shabbiness about the pavements and roads which speaks of neglect, as do the more than occasional streams of water from broken underground pipes.
It is small consolation that the Eastern Cape provincial government also recently placed Inkwanca Local Municipality under administration, but does show that Makana is not alone in facing real municipal management problems.
A glance at the audit reports of some of the other municipalities in the Eastern Cape is as doleful an experience as looking at Makana’s audit report.
Others also have disclaimers, which means the Auditor General in his clinical way is saying the figures can’t be 100% relied on.
The financial health of the city is not good, but not so bad as to spur flight. Looking at the financial information supplied by the municipality to the Treasury does show a number of problems but what it doesn’t show is a cash crunch.
At the end of the 2013-14 financial year Makana somehow managed to report R150m in cash or cash equivalents.
Also, the municipality achieved an operational surplus of around R6-million.
Yet something was wrong with the budgeting, because the municipality spent almost double its adjusted operational budget, and underestimated the revenue it would receive by around 22%.
Municipalities generally don’t have too much problem spending on operations, especially because a large part of this is simply the cost of paying employees and suppliers.
It’s not complicated.
Collecting property rates and service charges for water, electricity and sewerage aren’t that complicated either.
A worrying fact is that the cost of Makana’s personnel was around 42% of operating expenditure when it should be around one third.
Even more worrying is the underspending of the capital budget.
The motive in overspending or spending irregularly may be fraud or some other dishonesty.
Underspending looks like the opposite, an overcautious approach that cripples municipal renewal and redistribution. Why kill yourself to spend the money set aside for infrastructure when you get your check anyway?
The municipality spent a third of what was budgeted – for capital spending – but that was because it only got a third of the revenue it expected. Much of the money expected to be transferred from government was not transferred, for reasons that have not yet been put forward.
The capital amount spent of around R48-billion is less than half what was spent on capital projects in the previous financial year.
Who is to blame?
We await an explanation.
What we do know is that capital spending is falling behind.
This is serious, because the water outages and sewerage leaks we’ve seen have been the result of underinvestment in water infrastructure over decades.
What will happen to electricity distribution lines in the months and years to come if there is no money to invest in their renewal?
The emphasis when we think of municipal finance tends to be on just keeping in good order what we have, as well as rolling out roads and other new services into the underserviced townships to bring them to the same level as the formerly whites-only areas.
I suggest that we need a new vision, one that goes beyond simply keeping things ticking over. We should be focusing instead on re-invigorating the city through capital injections that make Grahamstown stand out in the province and the country, with the excellence of the infrastructure matching the excellence of the quality of education offered by the university.
A good place to start would be for the citizens to get more involved in understanding municipal finances.
