Parliament, Tuesday, 22 October 2024 – Following briefings by the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA) and its entities on their annual reports last week, the Portfolio Committee on COGTA approved its Budgetary Review and Recommendations Report (BRRR) today.
The BRRR process is important as it allows Parliament to make recommendations to the Minister of Finance and the cabinet minister responsible for a government department to ensure the effective and efficient use of resources to ensure optimal service delivery. According to Section 5 of the Money Bills Act, the National Assembly (NA), through its committees, must annually assess the performance of each national department before the national budget is introduced. The committees then annually submit BRRR for tabling in the NA for each department.
The committee’s BRR Report assesses the COGTA department’s service delivery performance given available resources and the effectiveness and efficiency of the department and entities’ use and forward allocation of available resources. The committee in this report also makes recommendations on the forward use of resources. This process enables the committee to integrate and consolidate budgetary oversight with other oversight work related to service delivery. So the BRRR is a very important tool for Parliament to influence budget allocation.
Adopting its BRR Report today, the committee noted that the department and its entities received unqualified audits, which is unprecedented. The committee, however, notes that there is still much to be done to improve financial accountability, including correcting material misstatements on financial statements, implementing internal controls, and complying with supply chain management policies to prevent the R137m irregular expenditure incurred across the portfolio during the 2023/24 financial year.
An important concern flagged in the report is the lack of dedicated budgets within municipalities and departments to fund post-disaster recovery. The committee was particularly concerned about the long turnaround between declaring a disaster and releasing funding, rendering the country’s disaster management system defective and inadequately equipped to serve its intended purpose.
Another big concern for the committee in the report is the “gross underperformance in Programme 2”. This programme entails intergovernmental support, which is at the centre of the support provided to municipalities. It is thus at the core of the department’s mandate. “Its gross underperformance (achieved only one of seven targets) during the period under review raises concern as to whether the department is adequately capacitated to fulfil its mandate,” the report states.
The committee was also concerned about inadequate councillor capacity and stated in its report that “cases of councillors who are not adequately equipped to fulfil their responsibilities in council are still too common”. The committee, however, noted the more than 4 500 municipal councillors and officials trained by the South African Local Government Association (SALGA). In its report, the committee also urged political parties to take seriously the calibre of party members they nominate to serve in councils. “If political parties continue to hold back on setting minimum criteria for the eligibility of party members to become councillors, the members’ ease of operation in council is likely to remain impeded,” the report states.
The committee’s recommendations in the report include aligning the department and entities’ local government professionalisation interventions to the public service professionalisation framework. The committee also asked to be further apprised of the possible extension of the Public Service Commission’s mandate to the local government sphere.
The committee also recommended sustained oversight over implementing the District Development Model and Municipal Support and Intervention Plans (MSIPs). In addition, quarterly engagements on the implementation of the MSIPs should be considered to ensure that the municipalities categorised as dysfunctional become stable.
In its report, the committee also recommended that the Minister of COGTA appreciates the urgency and importance of attending to the outstanding matters affecting the Khoi and San people. “It should be appreciated that the legislative delays are more than just a bureaucratic hurdle as there are tangible ramifications to the affected communities,” the report states. The committee also asked that the report compiled by the Commission for Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Rights on the Nama language be submitted to members.
ISSUED BY PARLIAMENT COMMUNICATION SERVICES ON BEHALF OF THE CHAIRPERSON OF THE PORTFOLIO COMMITTEE ON COGTA, DR ZWELI MKHIZE.
For media enquiries or interviews with the Chairperson, please contact the committee’s Media Officer:
Name: Alicestine October
Cell: 083 665 4345
Email: aoctober@parliament.gov.za
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