Year after year, reading Auditor-General Kimi Makwetu’s report on the state of municipal finances is akin to being caught unexpectedly in an ice-cold shower. The auditor-general categorises audit failure in five degrees of severity in the conventional fashion, from "unqualified with no findings" to "disclaimed with findings". The best that can be said about the report is that overall, it wasn’t much worse than 2016. The worst that can be said is that the situation is still shockingly bad. Just take one metric: the total expenditure budget of municipalities and municipal entities in 2015-16 was R378bn. Only 19% of this amount — R70.9bn — was spent by municipalities with clean audits. By far the largest category (122) fell into the category of "unqualified with findings", which constitutes expenditure of about R218bn. While these can vary in seriousness, the three categories that follow — qualified, adverse and a disclaimer — indicate serious financial mismanagement. A third of munici...
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