Minister of finance Enoch Godongwana has told parliament the National Treasury will dedicate resources towards supporting local government as councils work to improve service delivery and enhance revenue collections for services rendered.
Tabling his 2026 budget vote in parliament on Friday morning, the minister said a major priority for the National Treasury in the year ahead, with its allocation of R44.9bn, would be to improve service delivery and efficiency at the local government level.
“What we’re trying to do is to achieve efficiencies in municipalities, particularly in the utilities of water, electricity, waste, and so on,” he said.
“We also said at the beginning that when we came to the budget, we did not have the intention of increasing any taxes. What we will be focusing on is efficiency in the system.”
He said across the board, each metropolitan municipality has its own unique challenges, and that the degree of the challenges differs from one metropolitan municipality to another.
Godongwana said government and state-owned entities could not broach the conversation around declining levels of service delivery at a local government level and dismiss the billions owed to municipalities by state-owned entities, as well as national and provincial government departments.
“Provincial governments owe municipalities about R14bn. National government owes about R8.2bn … It is our intention to make sure the money is transferred back to municipalities. We also want to deal with the infrastructure challenges in water.
“While we want to deal with the infrastructure challenges in water, what is the challenge as I see it? The challenge, as we see it, is twofold. First and foremost ... at the moment, the infrastructure is old and dilapidated across the board. The second thing is that we’ve got a ground system that is all over. It’s not integrated.”
He said the Treasury will intensify its efforts to drive inner-city renewal in the eight metropolitan municipalities across the country, as well as in other large towns and cities.
“What we need is to bring people closer to work by improving the inner city development.”
The local government elections are scheduled to take place on November 4.
Business Times
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