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[FILE IMAGE]: Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke addressing the media after tabling her reports into the national and provincial governments.
Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke has made an impassioned plea that governance failures at municipal level should be dealt with, in an effort to improve audit outcomes of municipalities.
Maluleke briefed Parliament’s Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Portfolio Committee on the 2023-2024 Consolidated General Report on Local Government Audit Outcomes.
She again painted a grim picture, with only 41 out of 257 municipalities getting clean audits and only one Metro out of eight with a clean audit.
An unqualified audit opinion indicates that a municipality’s financial statements are free from material misstatements (errors or omissions) and can be trusted.#AGReport #MFMAGeneralReport #LocalGovernmentAuditOutcomes pic.twitter.com/KULU1Y0zvD
— Auditor-General South Africa (@AuditorGen_SA) May 28, 2025
Maluleke says without addressing governance failures, improvement will continue to be out of reach.
“We’ve got to worry about, yes, the administration led by the Municipal Manager, but we’ve got to equally worry about the Mayor and the Speaker and the Council. If we do that, then we’ll have some hope of building the capability we need, whether it’s skills, competence, ethics. We’ll only build those things if we sort out the governance arrangements. If we don’t deal with governance, we’ll never be able to sort out accountability and consequence management.”
When a municipality receives a clean audit, this means that its financial statements and performance report give a transparent and credible account of its finances and its performance against set targets. #AGReport#MFMAGeneralReport #LocalGovernmentAuditOutcomes pic.twitter.com/MzU7T7l19s
— Auditor-General South Africa (@AuditorGen_SA) May 28, 2025
