Restoring the finances of the sprawling Ekurhuleni metro is a huge task — but finance MMC Jongizizwe Dlabathi has made peace with this and put in place plans to improve the situation in the medium to long term.
Dlabathi took up the post in June, replacing the EFF’s Nkululeko Dunga, who had clashed with auditor-general Tsakani Maluleke over the metro’s finances. Ekurhuleni lost its clean audit status for the first time in three years and has been downgraded by ratings agency Moody’s.
The metro is a stark indication of how far the ANC has fallen electorally. It used to be a regional stronghold for the party, but after the departure of Mondli Gungubele as mayor, who was relatively successful in creating a strong administration, service delivery began to suffer and the party’s electoral support tanked.
In the 2019 general election, the ANC still enjoyed majority support in the region, with 53%. However, in the local government election in 2021 its support fell to 38%; this May it got only 35%. With its finances in dire straits, the metro has been unable to deliver services and fix crumbling infrastructure.
Dlabathi has now had time to examine and process the extent of the rot — and concedes that getting Ekurhuleni back on track will take time.
“We are slowly getting things right; we now have a plan we believe will yield positive results,” he tells the FM.
Key to this plan is to “revive and foster a culture of payment”. The metro is owed R25bn in outstanding rates and taxes by households and businesses; 80% of this is owed by homeowners.
The municipality has offered to write off 70% of this debt if homeowners come forward and enter into an agreement with it to pay the balance of the debt over 36 months.
The programme has been well received and will ensure that some payment, instead of none at all, is made to the metro, Dlabathi says.
Ekurhuleni itself owes billions to creditors such as Eskom, which is clamping down on nonpayment by its municipal customers. Dlabathi says it has set aside R500m to settle overdue invoices, focusing on SMEs.
The move is intended to relieve pressure on SMEs that rely on timeous payment to keep their businesses afloat.
So what went wrong in Ekurhuleni?
The decline, say insiders, began under Gungubele’s successor Mzwandile Masina. It accelerated after the 2021 election, when messy coalitions were installed. Ekurhuleni has had three mayors since then — the DA’s Tania Campbell was elected to serve for two short stints.
The EFF struck a juicy power-sharing deal with the ANC in Gauteng that put it on an almost equal footing with the ANC in terms of executive posts, despite its failure to win a single ward in the election. This was a source of deep unhappiness in the ANC. Dlabathi himself, before taking up the post as finance MMC, wrote to the party’s national leadership warning that this was a grave tactical mistake on the party’s part.
However, Dlabathi attributes Ekurhuleni’s cash flow woes to a “lack of focus” by the finance department and a lack of an “institutionalised commitment to controlling expenditure”.
“The issue of financial discipline was a key weakness,” he says. Paying R575 for a bale of 48 rolls of two-ply toilet paper is a simple example. He has now instructed the CFO to examine all costs and ensure that the metro is spending its money wisely.
Dlabathi, who started his career as a bank teller, is an internal auditor by profession. His private sector experience includes a stint as a money-laundering analyst at Absa. He also worked for the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa and in the office of the auditor-general. He served as an economic adviser to the former MMC for finance, Nkosindiphile Xhakaza, who is now the executive mayor.
Though the ANC has taken back control of Ekurhuleni — the two crucial posts of mayor and finance MMC are now filled by the party’s own — the EFF still wields an inordinate amount of power, controlling key portfolios such as water.
Dlabathi says the ANC is bringing the council in line with the party’s national framework for coalitions, which says that no party should be overrepresented in power-sharing deals in councils.
“Representation must accord with voter decisions and in line with how parties are represented in council,” he says.
The DA is the second-largest party in Ekurhuleni, and the regional leadership of the ANC has indicated that it is open to working with all parties. However, the ANC’s provincial leadership, led by provincial secretary TK Nciza and party chair Panyaza Lesufi, has vehemently resisted any working arrangement in the province that includes the official opposition.
Dlabathi says the regional leadership of the party is “continuously assessing” the performance of the Ekurhuleni executive and will communicate whether there will be changes to it at an “appropriate time”.
An added complication for the ANC in the region is the MK Party, which identified Ekurhuleni as a potential area for growth in the 2026 local government election.
The EFF has performed well in the region since its formation in 2014, but now that former EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu has defected to MK and been put in charge of the party’s secretariat, the red berets may be at risk of a loss of support to Jacob Zuma’s party.
The 2026 election is less than two years away. It will take time to fix Ekurhuleni’s broken balance sheet, but time is a luxury no-one can afford in this new era of coalition politics.