Councillors who owe Ndlambe money remained anonymous during a full council meeting on Friday August 29. But chairperson of the municipality’s audit and performacnce committee Bulelwa Nqadolo red-flagged the fact that people who are supposed to be conducting oversight are themselves compromised in this way.
Unspent budgets were another concern of Nqadolo as she presented her full report to councillors last week. She called out poor planning as the cause.
“When you receive money for a project, the [lengthy] environmental impact assessment processes should at least have been started,” she said.
People building structures where they’re not supposed to, then demanding services there and being given water and electricity at those sites was disastrous for proper town planning, Nqadolo said.
“You implement infrastructure in areas where you’re not supposed to be building,” she said, citing examples of informal settlements in the flood plains of rivers. “That delays procurement.”
Ndlambe Municipality is a municipality that has explicitly adopted the policy of upgrading existing informal settlements as one of the means to address its growing housing backlog.
Consequence management needed to kick in for the officials responsible for the millions being written off from Ndlambe’s budget every year.
Nqadolo berated the municipality for over-dependency on expensive outside contractors.
“You are supposed to only engage contractorws for specific things that the municipality does not have the capacity for,” she said.
She noted the apparent lack of consequences for breakages and theft.
“There have been lots of breakages as we can see from insurance claims,” she said. “What control measures are in place? For example, if an item was stolen from someone’s home, was it supposed to be there?”
When it came to the main agenda for last week’s meeting, it emerged that a jaw-dropping write-off of more than 5 million was on the cards.
Ndlambe Municipality is likely to have to write off R5.4 million in payments that residents, businesses and other entities have made to it, because there’s no way of tracking where they come from. The unallocated deposits have been accumulating since 2012, ballooning each year. Incomplete reference details and incorrect consumer account numbers are to blame.
Astounded councilors considered the options presented to them: to retain he balances indefinitely – “not recommended as this distorts financial statements and is contrary to good practice” or write off the balances with Council approval. Officials recommended the second option for the sake of clean financial records.
The meeting included several crucial statutory processes including the approval of the IDP/Budget process plan for the 2026/27 IDP revision; the tabling of the draft annual financial statements for the 2024/25 financial year; and the tabling of the draft annual report for the same period.
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This article was first published in Talk of the Town, September 4, 2025. The newspaper serving the communities of Ndlambe and the Sunshine Coast, with a weekly wrap of Makhanda news, is available at stores from early on Thursdays
