The high cost of empty promises and why local government fails the gogo test

This story has significance for readers across Africa and beyond.

Gogo said the amount before she sent me to the store â what we owed Mam Nxele, down to the cent. I went hoping to catch her out. Mam Nxele would turn the book round on the counter so I could find our name and read the figure myself, and I would read it twice, and walk home with nothing to report.

My mother was far away â she worked at Vuleka, the school for the deaf in Nkandla â and it was Gogo who ran the house at kwaNkabini. She knew what was in the tin, not roughly, not to the nearest rand, but the coins. One of them went missing once. I remember the afternoon it took to find it, and I remember that nobody in that house thought an afternoon was too long to spend on a coin.

There was no training behind any of this. Gogo had none. She had something else: she could not afford to be wrong. I have thought about that house often in the years since I qualified as a chartered accountant, because I have never audited a set of books kept to a higher standard. Scarcity is a severe auditor. It does not accept explanations, and it does not adjust its expectations downwards year after year until failure becomes the normal condition.

I raise this because in June, the Auditor-General published the accounts of every municipality in this country, and almost nobody read them.

The report nobody read

On 24 June, Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke tabled the consolidated report on local government audit outcomes for 2024-25. It covers the last audited financial year of the councils elected in 2021 â the same councils we are about to return or replace on 4 November. The report is free. It is online. It is the most complete account we have of what the past five years did to the places where we actually live.

It received a day of coverage and then the news moved on.

So let me translate it, because the language is the only real barrier, and the language stops being difficult the moment someone unlocks it.

Every municipality hands in a book once a year, and an independent auditor opens it to see whether the story and the numbers can be trusted. Not whether the town is well run â only whether the account of it is true.

Think of a childâs homework book.

A clean audit means the work was done, the answers are right, it was handed in on time, and what the child says about how it went is true. In the reportâs terms: the financial statements are accurate, the rules were followed, and the municipality reported honestly on its own performance.

Unqualified with findings â by far the most common outcome â means the answers are right, but the child broke some of the teacherâs rules. You can trust the sums. You cannot trust the child. The numbers can be believed, but something went wrong in procurement, in legal compliance, or in the municipalityâs own account of what it delivered.

Qualified means two pages are missing and nobody can say what was on them. Part of the numbers cannot be relied on.

Adverse means the book came in complete and neat, and the answers are wrong. Not a slip here and there. Wrong as a whole. The statements do not fairly present what happened.

Disclaimed, the worst of them, means the dog ate it â and nobody can tell you whether there was ever a dog. The auditors could not obtain enough evidence to form any view at all. There were, in effect, no books to audit.

Now the picture. Fifteen percent of municipalities achieved a clean audit, and those municipalities account for eight percent of the total expenditure budget. Three-quarters submitted financial statements containing material misstatements â meaning the figures first handed over were wrong, and were corrected only because auditors found the errors. Municipalities spent R1.61-billion on consultants to help produce those statements, and many still could not produce credible ones. Neglected infrastructure lost R14.73-billion worth of water and R21.63-billion worth of electricity â bought, paid for, and leaked into the ground, in a country where people still queue at a tap with a container.

There is a counterweight, and honesty requires it. Sixty-one percent of municipalities received unqualified opinions, a proportion last reached a decade ago. Disclaimed opinions fell from 29 in 2020-21 to eight. KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Mpumalanga eliminated theirs entirely. Somewhere in each of those municipalities is a finance official who did difficult, thankless work, and it would be a lie to pretend otherwise.

But an improvement in the paperwork is not the same thing as an improvement in the water.

The promise nobody could pay for

Here is the figure I want you to slow down for. Forty-five percent of municipalities adopted unfunded budgets, committing R288.17-billion they do not have.

An unfunded budget is not an accident. It is not a spreadsheet error, or bad luck, or a national economy failing a local council. It is a document that says, in numbers, that the money coming in will not cover the money going out. A council sits with that document in front of it. Officials have seen it. Treasury has often warned about it. And the council adopts it anyway, on a revenue target that nobody in the room believes will be met.

Then the year runs, and the money is not there. The clinic road is not graded, so somebody is carried down it. The pump station is not rebuilt, so the tap runs for two hours on a Thursday and the rest is queueing. The contractor is not paid, so a man who hired six people lays off six people. And by June, there is a shortfall to be explained to an auditor.

I want to be careful here, because there is a lazy version of this argument in which everyone in a council chamber is a thief. That is not what the evidence says, and it is not what I believe. Capacity is genuinely thin â small municipalities compete for finance skills against banks and audit firms and lose, and the R1.61-billion spent on consultants is, among other things, an admission by hundreds of councils that they cannot do this work themselves. Incompetence explains a great deal.

But incompetence does not explain an unfunded budget. Nobody accidentally votes for a promise they have been told cannot be kept. That is a different category of failure, and it deserves its own name.

I have written before about what it does to a person to wait for something they were promised by someone who was never going to arrive. The cruelty is not in the first disappointment. It is in what the waiting does afterwards. The one who waits does not stop believing the promise â they revise themselves instead. They decide they asked for too much, or asked at the wrong time, or were never quite worth the trip.

A town does the same thing. It stops expecting the road. Then it stops asking about the road. Then it begins explaining to itself why a place like this was never going to get one. That is how a budget nobody could fund becomes, five years later, a settled belief about who deserves what â and it is worse than a father who does not come, because this promise was made by resolution, in public, with a quorum, and minuted.

Not a party problem, which is the problem

Not one of the eight metros achieved a clean audit â not Cape Town, not Johannesburg, not Tshwane, not eThekwini, not Ekurhuleni, not Nelson Mandela Bay, not Mangaung, not Buffalo City. Between them, these metros manage 54% of the local government budget and serve 46% of South African households. They are governed by different parties and by very different coalitions. They failed as a set.

This should trouble anyone who has settled the question of local government by settling the question of party. Our arguments about municipalities are almost entirely arguments about who should hold them. The audit outcomes do not respect that framing. Whatever produces an unfunded budget or an uncollectable debtors book is not confined to one partyâs culture, and it will not be cured by a change of colours alone.

That has a practical consequence at the door. When a candidate arrives in the next three months, the useful question is not which party they represent â you can read that off the pamphlet. The useful question is what the audit finding at this municipality was, and what specifically they will do about it. Watch whether they know the answer. Most will not. That is information too.

Before 4 November

Find your municipality in the Auditor-Generalâs provincial report. It takes 20 minutes and asks three questions. What audit opinion did it receive, and for how many years running? Was its budget funded? And how much of the money owed to it has been written off as irrecoverable â because a municipality that cannot say who owes it money cannot plan anything, and in KwaZulu-Natal, roughly half of all municipalities have written off more than 80% of their debtors.

Then take those three answers to whoever knocks on your door.

Gogo had no training, no qualification and no money, and she could account for every rand that passed through her hands. She understood what has been lost somewhere between that house and the council chamber: keeping the books is not an administrative chore that happens after the real work. It is how you tell the people in your care the truth about what you have done with what belongs to them.

We spent an afternoon on one coin, because somebody in that house would go without if we did not find it. R288.17-billion was promised in our names by councils that knew the money was not there, and nobody has been asked to spend an afternoon explaining it.

The books are open. In November, we will decide whether to close them again. DM

Reporting originally appeared via Daily Maverick. Read the full source for additional context.