JOHANNESBURG - The City of Joburg this week received a pat on the back from Global Credit Ratings Co which awarded the city a long-term national scale issuer rating of AA(ZA) and a short-term rating of A1+(ZA). The outlook is recorded as stable.
The rating is defined as being of a “very high credit quality”.
In making the announcement, mayor Herman Mashaba said that despite the challenges the city faced, this rating demonstrates “the confidence which investors can place in the financial position of Johannesburg and its potential for growth”.
Mashaba added that the city has consistently demonstrated its financial resilience “as evidenced by the generation of recurring surpluses, maintenance of healthy cash balances and the continued roll out of the capital expenditure programme”.
The also demonstrated that the pessimists,who predicted the “imminent” financial collapse of the city were plainly wrong, said the mayor.
“There have been numerous baseless accusations against the city.”
In recent times, the city has begun to make significant progress in stabilising the finance department and prioritising expenditure towards addressing the R170billion infrastructure backlog.
The city has begun to demonstrate economic strength by achieving two consecutive quarters of job creation, seeing 109000 entering the job market.
Mashaba added that from a finance perspective, the city achieved another unqualified audit for 2017, while five municipal entities received clean audits.
The city recently reported that its spend of the capital budget reached 91% and 98.5% of its spending on infrastructure grants by the end of the 2017/18 financial year.