My jaw dropped at Knysna’s special council meeting last week when councillors were asked to approve an overdraft facility of R2-billion. Good grief! We knew there were money problems, but this could not be right.
Well, it wasn’t. The municipality was just having a Zuma moment with numbers. They wanted an overdraft of R20 million, but the amount that flashed up on the overhead screen was R20 000 million. The special meeting was to approve an adjusted 2019/20 budget because of the municipality’s “cash-flow crisis’. The overdraft is inevitable to get them out of the dwang, but doesn’t it make you mad? Imagine the interest on that R20m overdraft. Think of what it could have been spent on instead. And my big question is this: where were the councillors when Knysna’s finances were going down the tubes? What happened to their oversight role? Were they aware of the financial crisis as it developed, and if not, why? The good news is that the council approved the cost-cutting plan by acting municipal manager, Dr Michelle Gratz, who seems to have got a grip on the matter quickly. What was a real give-away of how bad things had got was that part of her plan includes implementing “strict credit controls” and “strict budget controls”. If these are part of the recovery plan, it seems to imply they were not already the norm. That is scary. The other eye-opener was that Dr Gratz recommended that the “scarce skills allowance” of 20% that the municipal manager and directors were getting, be scrapped immediately. This amounted to a whopping R117 000 a month. And here’s the thing: these payments were unlawful. The provincial government’s treasury department, and the MEC in charge of local government, Anton Bredell, had written to the Knysna municipality several times to tell them to stop, but to no avail. Now the provincial government has resorted to taking the municipality to court to get it to stop this unlawful “allowance” – and to get the money back. I asked the provincial government this week if there were any other municipalities that were giving themselves this “scarce skills allowance”, and was told by Bredell’s spokesman James-Brent Styan that Knysna was the only one in the Western Cape they were aware of. Styan said “despite numerous communiqués to the municipality that a scarce skill allowance is not permissible in terms of the applicable legislative prescripts, the municipality continued with the implementation thereof.” So the provincial government has been forced to go to court. Well, hats off to Dr Gratz for asking council to stop it immediately, before waiting for the court outcome. And that’s another thing: in South Africa we have got so used to corruption and mismanagement that we cheer when officials simply do their jobs properly. A final eye-opener: the deputy mayor told councillors they must “be mindful of” their responsibility to carry out their oversight role, adding that this meant compulsory attendance of meetings. Well, yes, of course. Were councillors not doing so already? Surely that is the least you expected when you voted for your councillor.
