South African (SA) political analyst Levy Ndou says poor consequence management in municipalities continues to drive fruitless and wasteful expenditure across the country.<\/p>\n
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His comments follow the release of the National Treasury Municipal Financial Management Act Compliance Report for the period between July 2024 and June 2025, which revealed that irregular expenditure had climbed to R268.1 billion ($14.8 billion).<\/p>\n
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The report found widespread failures in internal financial controls, with many municipalities opting to write off losses instead of enforcing accountability or recovering public funds.<\/p>\n
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Ndou described the situation in SA\u2019s municipalities as deeply concerning, warning that the problem has persisted for years without meaningful intervention.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe most unfortunate part is that this is not a new challenge or something new to us,\u201d Ndou said.<\/p>\n
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He added that many municipalities continue to struggle because of weak accountability systems and a lack of decisive action against wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
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\u201cAnd the unfortunate part appears to be that we don’t seem to be having very strong consequence management in a number of municipalities,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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Ndou also called on government to introduce clearer guidelines on the recruitment of municipal personnel, arguing that stronger capacity and skilled leadership are needed to improve governance and financial management at local government level.<\/p>\n
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–ChannelAfrica–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":34712,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[26],"class_list":["post-34711","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"Poor consequence management in municipalities continues to drive fruitless and wasteful expenditure across SA","published_date":"2026-05-18 07:12:25","news_description":"Poor consequence management in municipalities continues to drive fruitless and wasteful expenditure across SA","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/34711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/34711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34713,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/34711\/revisions\/34713"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=34711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}