10 municipal managers wasted R100 million of South African taxpayer money

Ten municipal managers across four provinces have wasted over R100 million of taxpayer money through maladministration and wasteful expenditure. 

These municipal managers are referred to as the “Terrible Ten” by Member of Parliament George Michalakis. 

Michalakis has brought to light the severe financial mismanagement these individuals have engaged in, resulting in the waste of millions of rands of taxpayer money. 

“The Terrible Ten are municipal managers across the country that we have identified on the basis of not implementing Auditor-General (AG) reports,” Michalakis told BizNews. 

These ten managers are repeat offenders identified by the AG, but politicians have taken no action against them. 

Michalakis explained that the role of a municipal manager is often overlooked in South Africa, as the focus is on the politicians elected as mayor or premier. 

However, municipal managers are crucial bureaucrats who run a municipality and hold the purse strings, implementing budgets.

“If you have a good municipal manager, the chances are that you will have a good performing municipality with strong service delivery. If you have a bad one, then municipal services will fall apart,” Michalakis said. 

The ten municipal managers identified by Michalakis are spread across the country, with five from the Free State, two each in the Eastern Cape and the North West, and one from the Western Cape. 

Michalakis made it clear that the list of ten managers is far from exhaustive, with there being many more out there. These are just the ten worst. 

“We had to shortlist this, and the competition was quite tough. It is quite sad that in a country like ours, there is a competition for the worst municipal manager in the country,” Michalakis said. 

“You cannot really identify a shortlist of ten without having some difficulty in getting down to only ten.” 

Some of these ten managers have worked at multiple municipalities, with Michalakis describing this as the “recycling” of compromised deployees. 

These individuals do the same with those below them, reappointing staff members who were fired in other municipalities. 

Taxpayer money flushed down the drain

Michalakis said the Terrible Ten have had a devastating impact on the municipalities they manage, resulting in more than R100 million in wasteful spending. 

“In some cases, just one manager had fruitless and wasteful expenditure of more than R100 million. This is in very small towns and poor municipalities,” Michalakis said. 

“If there was proper management, that R100 million could have gone to service delivery. While you sit now with the entire community having no water, R100 million cannot be accounted for.”

One concerning similarity among members of the Terrible Ten is that they are all highly educated. 

This raises the question of whether they are incompetent or willfully destroying municipalities to ensure that friends and family win contracts. 

Michalakis said many of these managers hold advanced degrees, with some being qualified lawyers and others holding PhDs. 

Despite this high level of education, these individuals have been unable to implement the AG’s recommendations. 

“This is the crux of the case against them. Despite the fact that the AG pointed it out, they have done nothing to stop it,” Michalakis said. 

“So there is, in my opinion, not only a factor of incompetence, but in some instances, serious neglect or corruption as well.”

The Terrible Ten managers have resorted to withholding basic audit documents to prevent the scale of their mismanagement from being seen. 

“For almost a decade, Masilonyana Municipalities, for example, has not submitted a single evidentiary document to the AG,” Michalakis said. 

In this municipality, payment slips are kept on iron sticks and are stored away at the end of the month with no formal bookkeeping.

Another municipality on Michalakis’ list had R3 million that was meant to be paid to Eskom, but went into the wrong account. 

This went unnoticed until Eskom questioned the missing payment. “I am not convinced that was a mistake. I don’t think that was just incompetence,” he said.