The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) is working hard to ensure that audit outcomes of the province’s municipalities improve steadily.
“Our hard work in our municipalities has, over time, translated into steady improvements in audit outcomes, measured not only by the seven clean audits for the 2012/2013 financial year, but by a constantly decreasing number of audit queries from the Auditor-General,” said Cogta MEC Nomusa Dube-Ncube.
He was speaking at the Local Government Municipal Finance conference, in Durban on Tuesday.
She said her department’s support structure and monitoring of municipal finances ensures that municipalities are able to plan and budget with integrity, raise their own revenue and collect outstanding debt.
“Even as we offer our municipalities’ round-the-clock assistance with planning, budgeting and expenditure management, we are mindful of the fact that local government is a separate sphere of government with an independent constitutional mandate. We are not running municipalities, we are playing a supporting role,” she said.
The MEC said her department often faces calls for direct interventions in municipalities and investigations into their day-to-day operations or protests against such interventions and investigations.
“Deciding whether to intervene and what to investigate is always a balancing act. We need to work within our mandate and limited resources and we cannot duplicate functions that are already performed by municipalities themselves or supreme audit institutions such as the Auditor-General, whose office pronounces on the regularity of municipal financial management,” she said. – SAnews.gov.za
