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Northern Cape Municipalities still fail to use conditional grants optimally, despite bulk infrastructure constraints contributing to housing backlogs and limited economic opportunities in many Northern Cape towns.

This is confirmed by a report from the Northern Cape Provincial Treasury indicating that municipalities spent only 48% of all conditional grants for the 2022/23 financial year by the fourth quarter, when they are meant to spend between 80% and 100%.

Despite the dire need to make municipalities energy-resilient and to ensure electrification of new housing developments, only 41% of the Integrated National Electrification Programme grant was spent.

Four of the five Priority Housing Development Areas in the province, which are meant to serve as catalysts for spatial development and growth, experience such significant constraints in bulk water and wastewater treatment infrastructure that future developments cannot be supported. But while more residents spend more days without clean water than before and while independent water quality tests recently confirmed the presence of cholera in the Vaalriver, only 47% of the Municipal Infrastructure Grant and 56% of the Water Services Infrastructure Grant was spent.

This failure to spend conditional grants speaks to bad planning, bad management, and bad processes that ultimately robs residents of basic services. Such low levels of spending could mean that grant funding will not be allocated to municipalities in future years, which will leave residents even worse off than before.

The Democratic Alliance raised our concerns about this in recent committee engagements with the Northern Cape Provincial Treasury and the Northern Cape Department of Co-operative Governance, Human Settlements & Traditional Affairs. We will continue to conduct oversight at critical infrastructure and development sites, so that we can intervene when services to residents are at risk.

Ultimately, it is only the DA that can rescue service delivery to residents of the Northern Cape.

Issued by Michael Kaars, MPL - DA Northern Cape Provincial Spokesperson on COGHSTA