The City of Johannesburg’s political and administrative leadership came under intense scrutiny in Parliament on Tuesday, with members of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA) questioning whether leadership failures lie at the heart of the metro’s deteriorating audit outcomes and governance challenges.
Appearing before SCOPA alongside senior city officials, Mayor Dada Morero was forced to defend both the city’s leadership choices and its overall governance record after members raised concerns over the municipality’s qualified audit opinion and hundreds of findings flagged by the Auditor-General (AGSA).
The appearance follows last week’s AGSA briefing which focused on the city’s 2024/2025 audit outcomes and painted a bleak picture, highlighting persistent governance weaknesses, financial mismanagement, infrastructure failures and accountability shortcomings.
One committee member, ActionSA MP Alan Beesly, described the city’s performance as “pathetic”, noting that the Auditor-General had recorded 527 findings against the municipality.
“Everything rises and falls on leadership,” the member told Morero, questioning the city’s continued governance failures and poor service delivery outcomes.
The MP further questioned Morero’s decision to appoint former finance MMC Margaret Arnolds during that period despite warnings from former Johannesburg mayor and ActionSA Mashaba that she was allegedly not suited for the position.
“How could you have appointed somebody who is so visibly weak in terms of finances to actually head the finances of the City of Johannesburg?” the member asked.
Morero rejected the criticism, arguing that political office bearers were appointed solely on the basis of technical expertise and were supported by professional officials within the administration.
“Political parties appoint leadership on the basis of the ability politically to deal with matters that affect the city,” Morero said.
“You realise even some of the MMCs who are here are not necessarily experts in that particular field, but politically they are appointed and the responsibility once they are appointed is for them to learn and improve and gather information on what is required of the portfolio.”
He argued that requiring technical qualifications for every political appointment would make future deployments difficult.
“Otherwise, we will not be able to deploy people. If we want chartered accountants to be MMCs of finance, it would mean we do have problems into the future.”
Morero said city officials and technical experts were appointed specifically to support political leadership.
He defended Arnolds’ tenure, saying the city achieved a number of financial management successes while she served in the portfolio.
“We had confidence that she would be able to navigate the space, which she did,” he said.
“If you look at some of the reports during her tenure, the city did perform well in a number of areas that were finance-related areas, including our collection rate and including the fact that we passed a fully funded budget during her tenure.”
The committee also questioned the presence of senior officials Tshepo Makola and Sinaye Nxumalo, who had previously faced allegations of misconduct during Mashaba’s administration.
The MP argued that both officials continued to face serious reputational concerns and questioned why they remained part of the city’s leadership team.
Morero strongly defended both officials, describing them as competent professionals who had successfully challenged allegations made against them.
“Mr Tshepo Makola is a competent individual,” Morero said.
“The allegations were thrown at him by the then mayor Herman Mashaba. Mr Makola went through a disciplinary process and also went through a court process which found him not to be guilty.”
He made similar remarks regarding Nxumalo, arguing that allegations made against her had also failed to stand up to scrutiny as they were “baseless and unsubstantiated”.
Morero further accused Mashaba’s administration of creating instability within the municipality through what he described as unsubstantiated allegations against city officials.
“The drop that you are seeing today in terms of performance on revenue collection was as a result of employees throughout the value chain in the revenue department deciding not to do anything anymore because anything you touched, you were then accused of corruption,” he said.
“In fact, Mashaba created weak leadership throughout the city.”
Committee members also raised concerns about the city’s service delivery performance and infrastructure programme after AGSA found that only 36% of infrastructure development targets had been achieved.
The city has also been criticised for weaknesses within its information and communications technology environment, with MPs warning that poor ICT systems affect billing, revenue collection and service delivery.
Morero acknowledged the municipality’s shortcomings and conceded that the latest audit outcome was disappointing.
“If you look at our presentation, you’ll see that the city has what we call core and group,” he said.
“The attempt has always been that we must always be at unqualified at least as a municipality.”
He acknowledged that while the city had successfully challenged some of the findings raised by AGSA, the overall outcome remained concerning.
“It is not something that we can write home about,” Morero said.
“We would have preferred to have been unqualified.”
The mayor told MPs that the city had already developed audit action plans aimed at addressing repeat findings and strengthening governance controls ahead of the next audit cycle.
“We will strive towards improving as the city,” he said.
The hearing forms part of SCOPA’s ongoing oversight of the City of Johannesburg following a qualified audit opinion and growing concerns over governance, accountability and service delivery within South Africa’s largest metropolitan municipality.