R23 Billion UIFWE: Nelson Mandela Bay Says Accountability Must Follow the Evidence

The principle of the dispute

Nelson Mandela Bay has stopped apologising for wanting its R23 billion problem solved. What it is asking for is harder than forgiveness: accountability, applied properly, case by case, until every rand on the register has been looked at and answered for.

That is the position the municipality has now put on record, and it deserves to be stated plainly, because it is stronger than either of the extremes shouting past each other in this debate. A blanket write-off would make the questions disappear. A blanket label would treat an accounting classification as proof of wrongdoing. The metro has chosen the harder road: the evidence, item by item, wherever it leads.

The Municipal Public Accounts Committee is intensifying its assessment of the individual unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure items that make up the balance. The principle guiding the work fits in one line. No one is above accountability, and no one gets condemned without evidence.

That principle has been run over by the political noise. It should not be.

The story is not a blanket write-off

R23 billion is not a number anyone can picture, which is exactly why it gets abused. So here is the story in plain parts.

On 13 August, a proposal came before MPAC to write off the entire register in one motion, backed by an unsigned affidavit of roughly five hundred pages, with no Section 32 reports before the committee and about thirty minutes for members to consider it. Thirty minutes is a lunch break, not an audit. National Treasury was right to kill it. The letter of 19 August from Treasury’s deputy director-general for intergovernmental relations, Ogalaletseng Gaarekwe, found a blanket write-off unlawful and non-compliant with Section 32 of the Municipal Finance Management Act, and warned that councillors voting for it risked misconduct charges and personal financial liability. Treasury said no, and it said no in writing.

But that dead proposal is not the metro’s position any more. In its statement of 25 August, MPAC chair Luxolo Namette was explicit: “The R23 billion UIFWE balance is therefore not being treated as one amount that can simply be written off. MPAC is dealing with the individual matters that make up the register.” The work, he said, is intended to give council “properly supported, evidence-based recommendations” on each matter.

Report that as what it is: a correction, not a scuffle. A UIFWE balance is not one transaction. It is a classification covering different forms of expenditure, accumulated between 2009 and 2021 across different contracts, officials, service providers and circumstances. Treating the whole amount as if it has one cause and one legal outcome would be as careless as ignoring it altogether.

What accountability actually requires

Accountability is not a number stapled to a slogan. It is slow, specific and unglamorous, and it asks real questions. What happened. Who authorised it. Whether the municipality actually lost money. Whether recovery is still possible. Whether the next step is disciplinary, civil or criminal. The municipality’s position is that those questions apply to everyone: officials, political office-bearers, service providers, contractors, any person the evidence touches. Nobody’s title is a shield.

If evidence points to a responsible person, the process follows that person. If no liability can be established, the public must not be sold an accounting entry as a conviction. Mayor Babalwa Lobishe put it with the precision this moment demands: residents are entitled to ask what happened to public money, and the answers must come “through evidence, due process and the law”. Where there is liability, it must be pursued. But we cannot declare a person guilty before the appropriate processes have been completed, nor describe every rand recorded as UIFWE as money that was stolen.

Not every rand on that register was stolen. Some of it was wasted honestly, some negligently, some criminally, and the difference is exactly what the investigation exists to establish. That is not a defensive formulation. It is the foundation of credible accountability, and it happens to be what the law requires.

The prescription question, brought into daylight

One hard question survives, and no honest account of this story gets to skip it. The Herald has reported that in its response to Treasury the municipality still argues that UIFWE recorded up to June 2021 has prescribed, because the city did not do in time the work that would have allowed recovery. Treasury, on the same reporting, rejects prescription as a basis for a write-off.

Say it straight: the city argues the money is legally gone because it never went looking. That argument deserves daylight, not a back room. The municipality’s own legal opinion, from Joubert Galpin Searle, already points the way: prescription cannot be assumed, and runs only from the day the municipality knows enough to act. That advice protects no one. It demands exactly what the metro has now committed to, a per-item reckoning of what is recoverable, what is prescribed, what needs investigation and what must be referred. The prescription argument can have its day, item by item, against the register, where it can be answered. It cannot be settled by correspondence.

Turn Treasury’s test into the city’s advantage

Treasury’s intervention is not proof that the Bay has no right to address its historic balance. It is a test of whether any decision can survive scrutiny under the MFMA. Handled properly, a test is an opportunity. A completed, documented assessment can give residents what political argument never has: which amounts are recoverable, which matters involve possible misconduct, which cases need further investigation, which amounts are legally prescribed, and which institutional weaknesses let the backlog grow for sixteen years.

The metro must now make that real. MPAC needs the documentation, the legal advice and the administrative support to do the work. Section 32 reports must reach the committee before items are put to it, not after. Residents deserve progress reports in plain language, because transparency will matter as much as the final outcome.

And there is a clock on the wall. In July, Treasury withheld the equitable share, the unconditional transfer that funds services to poor households. The conditions for release are process conditions. The surest way to unblock the money that serves the poor is the very evidence-led process the metro has now adopted. The work is not an imposition. It is the way out.

No protection for the powerful, no conviction without evidence

The municipality’s statement is strongest where it refuses to limit who may be implicated. No official shielded. No councillor shielded. No contractor or businessperson shielded. The same principle cuts the other way too: no one convicted by press release. Accountability is not collective punishment. It is the disciplined identification of responsibility, and the evidence leads or nothing does.

The R23 billion process will be judged by follow-through. If the evidence points to a person, the process follows. If money can be recovered, every reasonable effort is made. If investigation is needed, the matter is referred. If expenditure is irrecoverable after the lawful process, that conclusion is documented and explained, not asserted.

That is how Nelson Mandela Bay protects public funds, corrects the public record and answers the question residents are entitled to ask. Not with a blanket. With evidence.

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