Fact-Check — Did the EFF’s Ekurhuleni finance head achieve a clean audit?

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The finance department of the City of Ekurhuleni is led by an EFF councillor, Nkululeko Dunga. When the city tabled its 2022/23 Auditor-General report in mid-March, the EFF was quick to claim a victory for clean governance.

But is that really what the Auditor-General reported?

In the wake of the tabling of the latest Ekurhuleni audit outcomes, the EFF in Gauteng released a statement lauding the result as a victory for its finance head — saying that it indicated “clean and sound financial management and reporting practices”.

The EFF’s Gauteng branch retweeted a tweet claiming that Ekurhuleni had received “a clean audit” from the Auditor-General.

In addition, an editorial in the Sowetan reported that EFF MPs “claimed that under their watch the city received a clean audit”.

But the term “a clean audit” has a very specific meaning in the context of the Auditor-General.

According to the Auditor-General’s website, the term means:

“The financial statements are free from material misstatements (in other words, a financially unqualified audit opinion) and there are no material findings on reporting on performance objectives or non-compliance with legislation”.

This was not the outcome that the Ekurhuleni finance department actually received under the EFF’s watch.

Ekurhuleni received an unqualified audit opinion, which means:

“The financial statements contain no material misstatements. Unless we express a clean audit outcome, findings have been raised on either reporting on predetermined objectives or non-compliance with legislation, or both these aspects”.

In other words, there were adverse findings.

These were fairly significant: the Auditor-General found a total of R516-million in irregular expenditure, for instance, and R81-million worth of fruitless expenditure.

It is still a better outcome than for most South African municipalities. But it was also a downgrade from the previous year’s audit outcomes, which saw Ekurhuleni be named as the only metro in the country other than Cape Town to receive a clean audit.

As such, the EFF’s repeated use of the word “clean” to describe the audit result is factually misleading — given both the specific meaning of “clean” in this context, and the details of the Auditor-General’s actual findings. DM