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The Portfolio Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs is currently conducting an oversight visit in Kannaland Local Municipality in the Garden Route District in the Western Cape.

 The municipality is one of the 64 municipalities identified as dysfunctional in terms of the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs’ (COGTA’s) June 2021 State of Local Government Report. The municipality has also been categorised as ‘distressed’ in the terms of the Western Cape Provincial Treasury’s own internal vulnerability criteria. 
 
Yesterday, the committee met with the Mayor, Mayoral Council as well as executives from the municipality, Garden Route District, Western Cape Provincial Treasury, South African Local Government Association as well as executives from the national department of COGTA.
 
The committee calls on all these relevant government stakeholders to work with Kannaland Municipality to salvage the municipality out of the category of dysfunctional municipalities. Furthermore, the committee wants the national department of COGTA, National Treasury, Western Cape Department of COGTA and Western Cape Provincial Treasury to design a programme in terms of section 154 of the Constitution to support Kannaland Municipality. 
 
In the next follow up meeting between the committee and these departments, the committee has indicated that it will request updates from them on this programme and the support provided to this municipality. 
 
The committee has also made it clear that it is unacceptable for the municipality to adopt an unfunded budget for the current Medium-Term Revenue and Expenditure Framework period. This has been the practice in the municipality since the 2018/19 financial year. It has told the municipality that this is in breach of section 18 of the Municipal Finance Management Act, which stipulates that a budget must be funded from realistically anticipated revenues and accumulated funds from previous surpluses. 
 
The committee has also asked the municipality to develop a concrete turnaround plan to extricate itself from a situation of a disclaimed audit opinion to a clean audit opinion. The committee has noted some gaps in terms of communication between the municipality and the provincial department of COGTA. The committee wants the two parties to close this gap and work together in order to get the municipality to a functional state. 

Issued by The Chairperson of The Portfolio Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Fikile Xasa