The leadership of the Mangaung Metro appeared before Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) without adequate responses to questions about the municipality’s poor financial and service delivery performance.

The delegation, which included executive mayor Gregory Nthatisi and municipal manager Sello More, appeared before the committee on Tuesday 5 May to account for issues including spending 113% of the budget while achieving only 50% of service delivery targets.

The Auditor-General found that only 58% of the recovery plan’s activities have been implemented, with the municipality remaining in the “rescue phase” after 22 months. The AG could not verify critical information including water revenue, overtime payments and whether some goods and services paid for were delivered.

Conditional grants increased to R788,53 million in 2024/25, but the municipality underspent R191,73 million, following similar underspending of R193,59 million the previous year. National Treasury withheld R140,98 million in funding due to slow project implementation, affecting infrastructure projects.

A water project valued at over R106 million is only 26% complete. Mangaung owes R642,05 million for bulk water while losing nearly half of its water supply, approximately R495,55 million, through leaks, burst pipes and illegal connections.

Werner Pretorius, the DA’s mayoral candidate for the Mangaung Metro, said the delegation’s performance was “an embarrassment to the municipality and a display of the ANC executive leadership’s poor leadership and lack of political will”.

Pretorius said the metro spent only 2% of expenditure on repairs and maintenance of critical service delivery infrastructure. Irregular expenditure increased to R324 million from R278 million in 2024.

“The municipality’s poor performance and its ranking as the worst-performing metro in the country are not coincidental. It is the result of years of weak leadership, zero accountability, and the failure to enforce consequence management systems, as confirmed by the AG,” Pretorius said.

He said financial management in Mangaung had become audit-driven rather than leadership-driven, with problems addressed only when auditors flag them rather than being proactively managed.

The municipality has been under provincial and national intervention for several years with a financial recovery plan in place, but implementation remains slow.