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This week, the Portfolio Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs heard feedback from the National Steering Committee established in June 2011 to achieve a turnaround in the high levels of intergovernmental debt.

The results presented indicate that this may be yet another local government turnaround strategy in need of turnaround.

The Steering Committee gave feedback on the progress between 30 September and 31 December 2011. Some of the most disappointing findings include the following:

- The task team set itself an ambitious target of effecting a 50% reduction in intergovernmental debt owed to municipalities. To date, the average improvement achieved was only 11%.
- In 10 out of 20 municipalities targeted in the programme, there has actually been an increase in the debt owed by government;
- In another 5 municipalities, the reduction in debt was less that 5%;
- On 31 December 2011, municipalities were owed more than R3.5 billion in government debt

The Steering Committee found that persistent debt was attributable to, among others, the high rate of management turnover in municipalities and insufficient reconciliation of the state immovable asset registers for all three spheres of government and a lack of sound financial management.

Clearly much more attention must be given to this problem and innovative solutions must be found to compel government departments to settle their debts with municipalities. It is hardly justifiable for the Minister to encourage municipalities to practice effective credit control and encourage ratepayers to pay for services while his cabinet colleagues’ fail to ensure their departments do the same.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) proposes that an urgent inter-ministerial engagement is convened and that effective timelines are agreed upon for government departments to meet their obligations to municipalities. The DA will be tabling further questions to the minister in this regard and will insist on further engagement between the portfolio committee and the task team to improve performance.