Minister Hlabisa raises concerns over “poor performance” by Free State municipalities

Staff reporter

Bloemfontein – Velinkosi Hlabisa, Minister of COGTA has warned Teboho “Sulky” Mokoena, MEC of COGTA of poor service delivery by Free State Municipalities.

Hlabisa wrote to Mokoena with Sugar Ramakarane, head of department, Joyce “Pretenders” Mathae, Enoch Godongwane, Finance Minister copied.

The two page long letter dated 27 November 2025, follows assessment done on 4 November 2025 on performance of all Free State municipalities that receive MIG grant.

• Perennial underperformance – Despite urgent infrastructure needs some municipalities in the province are consistently failing to spend their full allocations, resulting in funds being reallocated to other municipalities or and even other provinces. This points to planning and execution inefficiencies.
• Project Delays and Poor Planning: Numerous projects suffer from significant delays due to inadequate planning, slow supply chain management processes, and issues with contractor performance. This leads to uncompleted projects and a lack of consequence management for non-performance.
• Capacity Constraints:These municipalities demonstrate lack of technical expertise and project management capacity to effectively plan, manage, and monitor complex infrastructure projects, despite support from the Municipal Infrastructure Support Agent (MISA), your department and other agencies of government.
• Lack of Maintenance: New infrastructure, once completed, often suffers from poor maintenance, leading to rapid deterioration and a failure to provide sustainable services. Some of these municipalities have shown reluctance to take up the requirement in the DoRA to use at least 10% of their MIG allocations to undertake repairs and refurbishment of critical infrastructure.
• Poor cashflow management: Some of the municipalities have inadequate monitoring and forecasting capacity thus failing to accurately predict when costs will be incurred and/or funding will be received relative to us the projects being implemented and for that matter other operations of the municipality. Additionally, municipalities often select emerging service providers who have limited cash flow. While the intention behind this practice may be positive, it has been shown to affect project performance within municipalities.
• Risk of funds being stopped and reallocated: Some municipalities are risk of having their funds stopped and reallocated to other municipalities unless they drastically improve their project management capacities and implement catchup plans.

Hlabisa concluded by requesting Mokoena to strengthen oversight and notable; Maluti-A-Phofung and Nala are yet to submit their annual financial statements.

We respectfully request that your office considers the following actions:

• Strengthen Oversight:Enhance provincial monitoring and evaluation mechanisms to ensure strict adherence to DoRA frameworks and implementation timelines. This should be done with other supporting agencies such as MISA,
  Treasury and DDM Champions for the affected district.
• Mandate Consequence Management: In cases where support has been provided but there is no improvement consequence management for councillors, officials and contractors responsible for poor performance, underspending, and irregularities must be enforced by the relevant authorities.

The poor service delivery performance assessment by COGTA follows Auditor General’s report that Free State municipalities are the worst in the country.

With local government elections creeping in, this will hurt ANC terribly because the grants are there to change lives but it’s deployees are failing to even plan, monitor and maintain.

The ship is sinking and not even Jesus can rescue it.

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