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IOL News
2 days ago
- Business
- IOL News
Mayors face scrutiny as Auditor-General calls for improved oversight
Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke has said that mayors of municipalities need to play their oversight role. Image: Independent Newspapers Archives Mayors of poorly performing municipalities are facing criticism and have been accused of failing to perform their oversight responsibilities and act against underperforming officials. The Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA), Tsakani Maluleke, took mayors to task amid revelations that many municipalities in the country are poorly managed. She recently tabled her report on the outcomes of municipalities for the 2024-2025 financial year. The report revealed that only 41 of the country's 257 municipalities achieved clean audits. The AGSA said the performance of municipalities reflected the tone set at the top by those appointed to lead them, adding that mayors contributed to the malaise by failing to perform oversight on officials. Maluleke highlighted during an interview that mayors had responsibilities and powers vested in law. The Structures Act details the responsibilities of the mayor, which include financial responsibility. The mayor is designated as the 'councillor responsible for financial matters', including preparing and submitting the draft budget to the council, national/provincial treasury, and other relevant bodies. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad loading Addressing the issue of audit outcomes, Maluleke said the law stipulates that it is the mayor who is supposed to monitor the implementation of the approved performance plan. The mayor is also responsible for monitoring budget expenditure and ensuring that the municipal manager puts in place the controls that will safeguard the existing budget. 'What we are reporting is that unfunded budgets continue to be approved by councils. Even when budgets are approved, you still end up with unauthorised expenditure because people are spending beyond what was initially approved. It is the mayor's job to oversee and take action, yet they don't,' she said. Maluleke noted that when the agreed performance fell short, there was often no action taken. 'People are not held accountable; the municipal manager is not held accountable. It is the mayor who must drive these matters, and the speaker and the council must ensure that these things are done. The individuals responsible for oversight are those who come through the political system,' she added. The AGSA cited the uMshwathi Local Municipality in KwaZulu-Natal as an example of improvement in audit outcomes, attributing part of this success to the hiring of a competent financial manager who had the support of the municipal manager and the political leadership. Mandla Zondi, the mayor of uMshwathi Local Municipality, acknowledged that mayors had a critical role to ensure the performance of the municipality. 'In our case, each quarter we review the agreed performance indicators to assess how the municipality is performing. If those are not met, we engage with them, even bringing in experts from Cogta to assist. We also closely monitor how the municipality's funds are being managed each month,' he said. Speaking on their improving performance, Zondi attributed it to a lack of interference: 'We politicians stick to our lane; we make the policies and allow the municipal manager and his staff to implement the work,' he added. Msunduzi mayor Mzimkhulu Thebolla said a distinction should be made between the executive mayoral system and the executive committee (Exco) members' mayoral system. 'The executive mayor has the power to appoint the people that they lead the municipalities with – they essentially have a cabinet that works with them, giving them more influence in that they pull in the same direction.' He said mayors and councils had a single point of influence and accountability in that they only appointed the municipal manager, who then appointed his staff. 'If the municipal manager is not performing, the mayor can take action and make recommendations to council to take action. If there is a manager that is not performing, we expect the municipal manager to take action. If the municipal manager does not, then we take action against the municipal manager.' EThekwini mayor Cyril Xaba agreed with the AG, saying as a political leader of a political entity, mayors had to set the right tone.'We are part of the system to improve transparency and ensure accountability in the exercise of our mandate as the municipality, which includes the mayor in our city because we are a collective. 'The mayor and Exco should ensure we attend to matters the AG raises, work with the city manager to deal with repeat audit findings to the extent the city manager has developed an audit action plan, and report on progress they are making on all audit queries, not only by the Auditor-General but by our own audit unit,' he said. Local government expert Mike Sutcliffe noted that mayors, whether executive or Exco, had substantial powers, particularly regarding oversight under the Structures Act, especially when it came to addressing issues of oversight. THE MERCURY
ABC News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Jack Ball wins $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize at Art Gallery of South Australia
Jack Ball has won the $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize for an artist under 40 for their installation Heavy Grit. The Ramsay prize, announced today at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), is awarded every two years and is open to young Australian artists working in any medium. Ball was inspired to make the installation — which combines photography and sculpture — after they encountered a collection of scrapbooks from the Australian Queer Archives in Melbourne. As a trans man, they were particularly interested in press clippings from the 1950s and 70s about trans people — some were transphobic, while others showed instances of care and desire. Originally curated by Sarah Wall, Heavy Grit first opened at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art in 2024. The judges for the Ramsay prize — Archibald winner Julie Fragar, head of visual art at the Queensland College of Art and Design; fellow artist Michael Zavros; and AGSA deputy director Emma Fey — were impressed by Heavy Grit's "experimental processes and sophisticated creative resolve". "We were particularly struck by the installation's restless, kinetic quality that refuses definition and creates an open opportunity to connect individually with the materials, forms and images the work deploys." The other 22 finalists in this year's prize — chosen from more than 500 entries — include Archibald Prize finalists Clara Adolphs and Jason Phu (also a former Ramsay finalist), and past finalists Emma Buswell, Liam Fleming, Alfred Lowe, Gian Manik, Tom Polo and James Tylor. Ball's work will be acquired by the gallery; past winners of the prize, which has run since 2017, are Vincent Namatjira, Sarah Contos, Kate Bohunnis and Ida Sophia. Fragar won the Ramsay's inaugural People's Choice prize in 2017. Ball is only the second Ramsay Art Prize winner to be based outside of South Australia; they live in Sydney, where they were born, but were raised in Perth. The Ramsay Art Prize exhibition runs May 31-August 31 at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Daily Maverick
4 days ago
- Business
- Daily Maverick
Auditor-General sounds alarm on governance crisis in SA's biggest cities, gives Cape Town the thumbs up
Of South Africa's eight metros, only Cape Town was given a clean bill of health by the Auditor-General. Johannesburg, eThekwini and Ekurhuleni received unqualified audits with findings. Buffalo City, Tshwane, Mangaung and Nelson Mandela Bay all received qualified audit opinions with findings. Only 16% of South Africa's municipalities can be trusted to spend public funds effectively — and they account for just 19% of the municipal expenditure budget, says Auditor-General (AG) Tsakani Maluleke. 'The good news is that we are back to 41 clean audits, which is where we started back in 2020-21, so we're no longer at the 34 that I talked about last year,' Maluleke told MPs in Parliament. 'However, that makes up 16% of the municipalities across the country. That tells you that only 19% of the municipal expenditure budget is being spent by municipalities that will predictably give you the outcomes you hope for, in that they have the disciplines and governance arrangements for you to trust that whatever money you send there will be spent in the way that you expect,' she continued. Maluleke revealed the dire state of local councils in her 220-page report on the 2023-24 local government audit outcomes, tabled to Parliament's Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) committee on Wednesday. In the lead-up to the 2026 local government elections, the state of South African municipalities is shocking: 'While 59 municipalities have improved their audit outcomes since 2020-21 (the last administration), 40 have regressed,' according to Maluleke. 'The messages in the last three general reports of the Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA) have been aimed at the local government administration that took office in 2021 — the mayors, speakers and council members who were elected to represent their communities. We called on them to work with urgency to overhaul a local government characterised by insufficient accountability, failing service delivery, poor financial management and governance, weak institutional capability and widespread instability. 'Despite the commitments made in response to these calls, action has been too slow. Based on the overall audit outcomes in 2023-24, the results from the detailed work that we performed at metropolitan municipalities and local municipalities with repeated disclaimer audit opinions, we can only conclude that little has changed and that local government continues to be in a dire state,' she said. MFMA Report 2023-24 by victoria on Scribd The number of municipalities with disclaimed audit opinions (the worst audit opinion) has decreased from 15 to 14. This is down from 28 in 2020-21, following the local government elections. 'The good news is that the disclaimers are continuing to [decrease]. That is credit to the provincial leadership in most of the provinces that have taken it upon themselves to support new municipalities to come out of disclaimer,' said Maluleke. 'We had 28 disclaimers [in 2020-21], we're now sitting at 14. It's still 14 too many.' She said disclaimer audit opinions were 'undesirable and intolerable', particularly when they related to an individual or an institution that was looking after public funds. Metros deteriorate In 2023-24, metros and their municipal entities were responsible for providing services to 8.9 million households (46% of households in SA) and managed 57% of the estimated local government expenditure budget, according to the AG report. With big budgets and more capabilities, one would expect South Africa's metros to have positive audit opinions. But, Maluleke said, 'the overall audit outcomes of metros have continued to regress since 2020-21' 'The metros, in our view, need particular, urgent attention if we are to get them to become the centres of economic growth and the centres that will make the lives of South Africans better. Right now, it would appear that we don't yet have that.' The City of Cape Town was the only metropolitan municipality to receive a clean audit in 2023-24, while the City of Johannesburg, eThekwini and Ekurhuleni received unqualified audits with findings. Buffalo City, Tshwane, Mangaung and Nelson Mandela Bay all received qualified audit opinions with findings. 'The continued weakening of these metros over time has led to a situation where their financial health has deteriorated — many of them continue to be downgraded, three of them just this year,' she said, adding that it had also led to a situation where their infrastructure projects were not well-managed. Maluleke singled out Tshwane and Johannesburg for not budgeting adequately for the maintenance of their assets. 'The weakening of these institutions is something that we need to arrest — courageously, boldly and urgently so.' Maluleke questioned whether the leadership of these metros included 'the type of people that are equal to the task'. Unfunded budgets The AG told MPs that the 'culture of approving unfunded budgets remains a problem'. In the 2023-34 financial year, she said, 113 municipalities (44%) approved unfunded budgets. Of the 113 municipalities, 86 had approved unfunded budgets for the past three years. 'This [is] despite the fact that the provincial treasury would've reviewed the budget and given advice, or the National Treasury for metros would've given advice. Municipalities continue to approve unfunded budgets. 'It's become a culture,' she said. Maluleke said that when these unfunded budgets were approved, her office still saw unauthorised expenditure. According to her report, the biggest contributors to unauthorised expenditure in 2023-24 were the City of Johannesburg (R2.76-billion), City of Tshwane (R2.15-billion) and Nelson Mandela Bay (R1.44-billion) Accountability ecosystem 'Every single public institution doesn't operate as an island,' Maluleke told MPs. She said that 'beyond the boundaries' of councils, there were responsibilities that lay with the legislature and administration at provincial level. 'When we look at the governance arrangement within the country, we are convinced that if every single player in this ecosystem of accountability did their part well and consistently so, and if every single player was seized with ensuring that they collaborate and cooperate properly, we would have very few governance problems — unlike the situation right now,' she said. It was up to the provincial leadership, including the provincial treasury, Cogta and premiers, 'to set the tone around what is tolerated'. That being said, the role of mayors cannot be understated, according to Maluleke. 'The role of the mayor and the speaker are very important. When mayors do their part, things run well, and when they fail to do their part, things do not run so well.' DM
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The ‘dangerous' Australian women whose art was dismissed, forgotten – and even set on fire
When Justine Kong Sing stepped off a steamship into Edwardian London, the Nundle-born daughter of a Chinese merchant could tell straight away she was a long way from Australia: amid the 'roar and rush' of the city, no one seemed to notice her. 'In the colonies, where foreigners are treated differently, an Oriental suffers keenly the mortification of being stared at, and often assaulted, because of his color!' she wrote in a widely published account. But the 43-year-old soon attracted a different kind of attention, studying at the Westminster School of Art and exhibiting at London's Royal Academy and the Paris Salon. Basing herself in Chelsea, her specialty was watercolour-on-ivory miniature portraits, painting 'London Society beauties' and a Chinese minister's wife. But one pocket-sized piece, painted in 1912 – soon after she arrived in England – and titled simply Me, has Kong Sing herself staring quizzically at the viewer, eyebrow arched and head tilted under a green hat. Kong Sing's known body of work is tiny in almost every sense, and for the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) curator Elle Freak, she remains an 'enigma'. Freak is a co-curator of Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940, an expansive new exhibition co-presented by AGSA and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Some of the 50 featured artists are already icons: the Archibald-winning face of Nora Heysen; the gentle cubism of Dorrit Black; Margaret Preston's still life studies; and the vivid, stippled colours of Grace Cossington Smith. But many, like Kong Sing, are being salvaged from obscurity. 'That's been the challenge of the whole project,' Freak says. 'Especially these artists who were working internationally, trying to trace their movements, trying to find their works that sold overseas. 'There are some artists along the way where we've come across a work and it's the only example that we really know.' Freak and co-curators Tracey Lock and Wayne Tunnicliffe spent years mapping this intergenerational movement of women who traded the antipodes for Bohemian melting pots in Bloomsbury and Chelsea, or Paris's left bank. From the late 19th century they abandoned the parochial constraints of the home and the homeland to make their own way on and off the canvas. For Victorian-born Agnes Goodsir, Paris was a place where 'art is something more than a polite hobby'. While Goodsir made a living from conventional commissions, Freak says her private works are often 'subtly subversive and coated with sapphic symbolism'. 'She really was committed to this emotional form of realism, where she was more interested in the mood of her sitter,' Freak says. Often that sitter was Cherry: the nickname of Rachel Dunn, a divorced American musician and Goodsir's long-term partner, who is seen in works such as 1925's Girl with cigarette. Goodsir was pipped to be the first Australian woman elected to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts by Bessie Davidson, an Adelaide-born artist who also became the vice-president of the Société des Femmes Artistes Modernes. Davidson's painting Intérieur (interior) was also completed in Paris in 1925, and turns the familiar trope of a bedroom scene into a site of intimacy and liberation; we see a hairbrush teetering on the edge of a dresser, a nude study perched above the unmade bed – and the reflection of Davidson's French partner Marguerite Le Roy just visible in a mirror. 'You get a sense that a moment has just passed,' Freak says. Dangerously Modern's focus is deliberately blurry; Australian and New Zealand-born expatriates are placed alongside inbound migrants, reflecting a decoupling from a notion of national identity that resurgent – and male-led – art movements back home were trying to galvanise. Freak and her colleagues trace more subtle points of convergence and exchange: Kong Sing once shared a Sydney studio with Florence Rodway; oils by Hilda Rix Nicholas and Ethel Carrick respond to exoticised colours and markets of Tangier, Morocco and Kairouan, Tunisia; and Girl in the sunshine, by New Zealand-born Edith Collier, was painted in the Irish village of Bunmahon, as part of a 1915 summer class led by Margaret Preston. A trio of paintings by Dorrit Black, Grace Crowley and Anne Dangar each capture a different view of the French village Mirmande – all three painted on the same field excursion in the summer of 1928. 'You've got the Irish moment, you've got a Mirmande moment, you've got your circle of artists in the Latin Quarter in Paris, all living in close contact with one another,' Freak says. In fact, Bowen and Davidson 'lived in the very same apartment building, and Bowen referred to Davidson as 'the old Australian impressionist on the top floor''. For artists who bucked tradition, borders, and convention, their often cool reception back home and subsequent omission from the Australian canon was structural, geographic and political. The show's title comes from Thea Proctor, who was amused to be regarded as 'dangerously modern' upon her homecoming in 1926. Freak and her co-curators also point to the art historian Bernard Smith's dismissive labelling of female expatriate artists as mere 'messenger girls' in 1988. Some works were literally too hot to handle; it's hard to picture a stronger expression of patriarchal suppression than the day Collier arrived home to find her father had burned a series of her boundary-pushing nudes. (A rare survivor appears in Dangerously Modern, making its first Australian appearance.) For Goodsir, at least, her love and muse ensured her legacy would be waiting once Australia caught up. 'After Goodsir passed away, Cherry sent her works back to Australia and said to keep them until audiences were ready – and then to distribute them more widely,' Freak says. Kong Sing died in Sydney in 1960, having eventually returned to 'the colonies' after two decades in England and Spain; a niece donated Me to AGNSW the following year. Now, elevated into an alternative Australian canon, Kong Sing has another opportunity to turn heads in her home country for her watercolours – not her complexion. Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 is showing at AGSA until 7 September, and AGNSW from 11 October 11 to 1 February 2026
IOL News
19-05-2025
- Business
- IOL News
KZN municipalities overspend budgets but fail to achieve service delivery targets
Officials from the Office of the Auditor-General SA met with members of the Scopa committee at the KwaZulu-Natal legislature this week to give a detailed briefing on the state of municipalities. Image: Independent Newspapers Archives The Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) in KwaZulu-Natal is demanding answers on how municipalities are spending their budgets following concerns that the spending does not align with service delivery. The spending habits of some municipalities were flagged recently by the Office of the Auditor-General of SA (AGSA) during its meeting with Scopa in the KZN legislature. The AGSA revealed that some municipalities are spending their way into ruin, indicating that some of them often allocate a portion of next year's budget in the current financial year. Members of the committee stated they are waiting to receive a proper breakdown from the AGSA on how these municipalities are spending their budgets before addressing the matter with the municipalities. Nomalungelo Mkhize of the AGSA office in KZN said, 'It is important that there is useful, reliable reporting and performance planning for municipalities because it shows that one knows where they are insofar as service delivery is concerned and what needs to be done going forward.' Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. 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Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Next Stay Close ✕ She noted that the AGSA found that in most municipalities, not all performance targets were met, even though the majority of the budget was spent. She stated that they found that 26% of municipalities had reported achievements that were not reliable, with indicators and targets that were not well-defined or measurable. Some excluded indicators that measure performance in their core mandated functions. The AGSA office found that it was only the Zululand District Municipality that had spent its budget and achieved 100% of its targets. She said the reasons for the non-achievement of targets in municipalities include delays in the supply chain management process, poor performance from contractors, inadequate project management, weak financial controls, and insufficient resource planning. Mkhize added that the budget is spent without correlation to the targets achieved. In one municipality, 100% of the budget was spent, but only 62% of the targets were achieved. In another municipality, they overspent on their budget and only achieved 20% of their core service delivery targets. 'Despite spending the majority of the budget, the key service delivery targets were not achieved,' said the AGSA official. She said in one of the big municipalities in the province, an improvement has been noted in the percentage of targets achieved, increasing from 74.58% to 83.93% in the current performance period. 'However, the non-correlation of targets achieved and budget spent remains a concern, as fiscal pressures require a more efficient approach to service delivery.' The non-achievement of key service delivery targets poses significant risks relating to insufficient access to water, sanitation, electricity, and waste management services, leading to deteriorating living conditions. Residents and communities may lose trust in local government, leading to protests, service delivery strikes, and civil unrest. Additionally, there is a lack of consequences for officials who fail to achieve key service delivery targets, the report by the AGSA added regarding this matter. Tim Brauteseth, the chairperson of the Scopa committee, said they are concerned about the situation and will soon be demanding answers from municipalities. He said despite substantial budgets, key service delivery targets are not being met. This is particularly evident in infrastructure projects, where delays, cost overruns, and substandard work are common. 'A closer study of this situation reveals that in one district municipality, they spent 113% of (their) budget and achieved only 20% of (their) targets. Another spent 100% and only achieved 32%, while another overspent its budget by 120% and underachieved at 54%.' He said as part of KwaZulu-Natal's (KZN's) Government of Provincial Unity (GPU), the DA will insist that municipal leadership prioritise effective budget management and ensure that funds are allocated and utilised efficiently. He added, 'There must be a stronger focus on planning, monitoring, and executing infrastructure projects to avoid delays and cost overruns. Additionally, maintenance budgets must be adequately funded to ensure the sustainability of existing infrastructure. 'We call on all stakeholders, including municipal leadership, the Auditor-General, and oversight bodies, to take immediate and decisive action to address these issues. 'There must be a culture of accountability and transparency within our municipalities to ensure that public funds are used effectively to improve service delivery and the quality of life for all our province's people,' he concluded. THE MERCURY
