Durban - The Msunduzi Municipality is reviewing its organogram to determine if it needs all the staff it currently employs, as it looks to cut costs.
This is one of the actions the municipality that encompasses Pietermaritzburg, the KwaZulu-Natal capital, is taking as it battles to stay afloat.
In an interview with The Mercury recently, municipal manager Lulamile Mapholoba revealed that the financial situation of the city was not good.
The municipality has been under administration for the past few years and these woes have led to experts from the national government being brought in to assist.
Last year, The Mercury reported that the municipality was owed more than R5 billion by ratepayers for unpaid services. This year, it is aggressively going after businesses and government departments that owe for utilities, cutting their services to force them to pay.
The municipality is also deeply in debt with Eskom and Umgeni Water.
It recently had to hold an emergency meeting with Eskom after the power utility threatened to impose load reduction that would have subjected residents and businesses to even longer power outages over and above load shedding.
Mapholoba said: “The financial situation in the municipality is not good, we are taking multiple steps to correct this situation.
“One of the steps that we are taking is that we are looking at our organogram to check if all the staff members that we currently have are needed by the municipality,” said Mapholoba.
Mapholoba said this did not mean that the city would start a retrenchment process should a review find that the municipality had a bloated staff complement. He said they would follow a natural process of job shedding, which could include encouraging people who are close to retirement to retire, and not filling unnecessary vacancies.
He pointed out, however, that the primary focus of this review was aimed largely at management level.
“We are supposed to be structured in a pyramid shape where you have the least amount of staff members required at the top and then more staff members lower down, but in our case that does not seem to be the case,” he said.
He said the City was working hard to honour payments to Eskom and Umgeni Water and painted a bleak picture of the water and electricity losses suffered.
While he did not have a figure of how much the city spends on the services, he said the losses, incurred largely as a result of theft, were significant.
“Of the water and electricity we buy, we lose about 25% of this while the national norm is around 12%,” he said.
DA councillor Ross Strachan said the party had proposed changes to the organogram in their alternative budget proposal.
“We said that there is a need to deal with the bloated organogram where there are five people doing one person’s job.
“Another massive factor is that we are spending close to R100 million on security per annum, running at 150% loss at our airport and have a forestry entity that is non-functional, which has become a liability,” he said.
ACDP councillor Rienus Niemand said: “The fact that the municipality has been under administration for almost four years and is deteriorating is an indictment on Cogta (Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs), the MEC and the administrators,” he said.
Cogta spokesperson Senzo Mzila said the assertion that the municipality continued to be mired in crisis was untrue and that since the intervention, there had been a lot of improvement.
He said to address issues of vandalism of infrastructure, the municipality had reported these incidents and SAPS was investigating.
To address water losses, he said the non-revenue water master plan had been completed, waste management was stable due to being prioritised, there was now sufficient burial space and there was work on roads and stormwater pipe maintenance.