Johannesburg – Emfuleni Local Municipality spent over R378 million on employees’ overtime for the past five years.
The municipality also paid over R29 million in overtime to employees in four months of the national lockdown.
According to Kingsol Chabalala, the DA Emfuleni North Constituency Head, this information was revealed by Lebogang Maile in a written reply to his questions at the Gauteng Provincial Legislature.
Maile is the MEC for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs in Gauteng.
Chabalala said it was worrying that Emfuleni, which is facing a serious cash flow problem, continued to pay “a ridiculous” amount of money for employees’ overtime.
He said while they understood there were situations where the employees must work overtime there should be a better way of compensating employees for overtime worked, considering Emfuleni is broke.
The following amounts are said to have been spent employees’ overtime in the last five financial years:
2015/2016 - R61 441 458,08
2016/2017 - R76 800 147,68
2017/2018 - R68 619 491,80
2018/2019 - R80 975 953,56
2019/2020- R90 695 761,49
Then during the lockdown, this is how much employees were paid for overtime:
May 2020 – R 6 810 189,07
June 2020 - R 8 771 092,07
July 2020 - R7 060 115,67
August 2020 - R6 641 669,32
Chabalala said that money could have been used to ensure basic services were rendered to Emfuleni residents by paying debt owed to service providers such as Eskom and Rand Water.
“It is concerning that employees are paid overtime while service delivery has collapsed in Emfuleni.
“It has now become the norm where the ANC governs to spend ridiculous amounts on employees while the residents suffer from a lack of adequate service delivery.”
Chabalala said they were calling on Maile to urgently intervene and implement other ways of compensating the employees for overtime as part of his interventions to save this municipality.
“The MEC should ensure that Emfuleni’s finances are spent wisely for the benefit of its residents. We will also table follow-up questions to ascertain which departments are paying employees overtime and how much per employee is being paid,” he said.
IOL