Auditor-General reveals dismal state of government in Eastern Cape ahead of Ramaphosa visit

Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke. (Photo: Gallo Images / Darren Stewart)

13 Apr 2025

A damning report from the Auditor-General has revealed shocking findings made against the Eastern Cape government, highlighting a lack of accountability and vague reporting to hide a dire absence of performance and service delivery. The findings come before President Cyril Ramaphosa’s oversight visit on Tuesday.

‘The culture of unaccountability and lack of transparency has resulted in a stagnation in audit outcomes.”

This is how the Auditor-General (AG) began a presentation to the National Council of Provinces last week, revealing the dismal state of the Eastern Cape government.

Auditors found that in 97% of cases where material irregularities existed in financial reports, no actions were taken to address them until the AG issued notifications.

The report highlighted that the provincial treasury was providing support to struggling municipalities with unfunded budgets.

The AG also highlighted the rot in the province’s municipalities and the lack of appropriate action, leading to the provincial legislature – also called out by auditors for failing to do its job – summoning seven municipalities to a meeting on Friday.

These municipalities are the Buffalo City Metro in East London, Raymond Mhlaba Municipality in Fort Beaufort (now KwaMaqoma), Makana Municipality based in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), Walter Sisulu Municipality in Aliwal North, Ingquza Municipality in Lusikisiki, Sundays River Valley Municipality in Kirkwood (now Nqweba) and Sakhisizwe Municipality in Cala.

They were asked to brief the committee on the state of their municipalities, focusing on good governance and public participation, institutional transformation and organisational development, financial viability, basic service delivery and infrastructure development. The committee also asked for a brief on the outstanding and current matters under investigation at each municipality.

Read more: R20bn or 20 years: What a single rural Eastern Cape municipality needs to provide water to residents

“The number of dysfunctional municipalities did not decrease. This indicates that the interventions have not been effective. There is no structured process to monitor municipal support and intervention plans and their impact,” the AG found.

It also found that the province, which often bears the brunt of weather-related disasters, still did not have the funding or the capacity for proper disaster management.

“The department [of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs] has not yet adopted the national framework on the professionalisation of the public sector. The department is of the view that the framework is not a legal document therefore not enforceable to be implemented. In addition, the national department of CoGTA has not yet issued any regulation, circular or guidelines on how the new framework should be implemented by the local government sector. Limited progress has been made on the implementation of the district development plans,” the report continues.

In provincial finances the AG found R467.7-million unauthorised expenditure, R2.7-billion in irregular expenditure and R148-million in fruitless and wasteful expenditure.

The provincial legislature had regressed from a clean audit opinion to an unqualified opinion, with findings due to noncompliance that had to be reported.

This noncompliance included that portfolio committees had not implemented consequence management in departments that had not responded to resolutions communicated, even after follow-ups had been done.

“The committees did not always track and monitor key infrastructure projects for most of the departments,” the report continued.

The auditors said various departments reported achievements that could not be corroborated, including the departments of Transport, Health, Education, Social Development, Human Settlements, Office of the Premier and the Rural Development Agency. All of these reported achievements that could not be substantiated had been for key development goals in the province, including the state of the roads, the number of facilities provided by the Department of Public Works, the number of houses built and the number of patients benefiting from psychosocial support provided by the Department of Social Development.

Read more: Court orders Eastern Cape municipality to build proper road for villagers enduring ‘deep pain and suffering’

The failures that were reported by departments were also devastating.

The Department of Education did not achieve 80% of its targets for public ordinary schools and infrastructure delivery performance indicators, the report said.

The Department of Health had not achieved 54% of its district health services performance indicators.

The Department of Transport had not achieved 28% of its service delivery indicators.

The Department of Human Settlements had not achieved 27% of its service delivery indicators.

Two departments were singled out by the AG for spending their entire budgets but achieving very little. The Department of Education’s Public Ordinary School Education programme had spent 100% of its budget and achieved 20% of its targets. The provincial district health services overspent its budget and only achieved 45% of its targets. As a result the numbers in key programmes, involving vulnerable sections of the population, showed severe underperformance. The medium target for the Education Department was to get 2.98 million children into early childhood development centres, but only 101,365 had been.

Human Settlements’s goal was to upgrade 1,500 informal settlements, but achieved none.

The auditors noted that manual systems to report performance might be at the heart of this dismal report, as well as a lack of coordinated processes.

audits R7.4bn Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke. (Photo: Gallo Images / Darren Stewart)

Read more: Service delivery collapse: ‘Gatvol’ Eastern Cape resident reports provincial-wide failures

Several provincial government departments have regressed in their audit findings, including the Office of the Premier, the provincial legislature and the Department of Sport, Recreation, Arts and Culture. The departments of Education and Health did not improve on their audit outcomes either and still have qualified opinions with findings.

The auditors also highlighted that key indicators for core functions in the provincial government had not been included in the Eastern Cape Department of Education’s annual performance plan. These included lesson plans for home-language literacy in grades 1 to 3, an early reading assessment for Grade 3, a plan for coding and robotics curriculum implementation and a school readiness assessment system.

The report notes that this will undermine goals set for 10-year-olds enrolled in publicly funded schools to read for meaning, and to improve the school readiness of children in early childhood development centres.

The report also raised the alarm about the state of information technology systems in the province.

At the Department of Health systems were either not working or not fully used, many districts had no internet or connectivity, and IT infrastructure at hospitals and clinics was described as poor. There was no disaster recovery plan for lost data and the administration of medicines, and patient records were done manually with no use of systems or technology to adequately record the information and report.

The Department of Education also had old IT infrastructure and connectivity problems.

A system developed to improve scholar transport was not being used, according to the auditors, and did not interface with the school or eNaTIS databases.

The AG’s report on the municipalities in the province mirrors an oversight report by the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) issued at the end of March.

Members of the committee visited the OR Tambo District in the east of the province and the Buffalo City metro in East London where “it noted with alarm the state of most of the projects it visited at both municipalities”.

The projects were chosen following the reports the committee received from the AG and the Special Investigating Unit.

Their observations included chronic delays and cost overruns amounting to hundreds of millions of rands, the persistence of a yearslong legacy of supply chain and financial management misdeeds and mismanagement, leading to write-offs or unresolved irregular expenditure; consulting engineers certifying invoices for payment when work had not been completed and who were never held accountable; and a culture of no consequences, with executive authorities either quashing reports on malfeasance or defending inexcusable failure to act.

“Infrastructure departments and projects appear to be a cesspool of malfeasance and maladministration,” the Scopa members said.

Following these reports the DA’s leader in the provincial legislature, Vicky Knoetze, called on premier Oscar Mabuyane to urgently establish a provincial commission of inquiry into the state of governance and infrastructure projects in the Eastern Cape.

“This follows alarming findings from both the Auditor-General and the National Standing Committee on Public Accounts, which confirm a deepening crisis of accountability, financial mismanagement and systemic failure,” she said.

She added that the regression of several provincial state departments’ audit outcomes was a reflection of weakened oversight, declining accountability and a government increasingly unable to meet the needs of its people. DM

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