Empty promises — why SA local government fails the gogo test

The Auditor-General’s latest report exposes a systemic failure in local government, as municipalities continue to gamble on unfunded budgets, leaving essential services and communities behind.

Themba Dlamini is a husband, father of four, pastor and chartered accountant who loves South Africa – warts and all. He is the author of Village Boy: A Memoir of Fatherlessness, and writes to wrestle with hard truths, stir hope and help build a country in which his children can thrive.

Gogo said the amount before she sent me to the store – 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 – she worked at Vuleka, the school for the deaf in Nkandla – 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.

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 – 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.

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 – only whether the account of it is true.

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 report’s terms: the financial statements are accurate, the rules were followed, and the municipality reported honestly on its own performance.

Unqualified with findings – by far the most common outcome – means the answers are right, but the child broke some of the teacher’s rules. You can trust the sums. You cannot trust the child.