The City of Cape Town has shed nearly 4 000 employees under its restructuring plan - and yet its salary bill has gone up by nearly R1-billion.
The restructuring exercise, begun in earnest last year, was designed to save money on staff and streamline service delivery.
There has been widespread criticism of the high salaries being paid to new senior managers - and a report to the mayoral committee, leaked to the Cape Argus, is likely to add to these concerns.
Among its key points are:
- The July 2005 projected spending on the packages of the top three management levels is R70-million over budget, and this will increase "drastically" once another 206 vacancies have been filled.
- Total municipal arrears as of July 31 stood at R3.9bn, nearly 25 percent of the city's total budget of R18bn.
- In July the city budgeted for cash income of R1.2bn, but received only R734,3-million.
- The city had taken steps to address these issues, including cutting back on overtime.
- The staff budget for the year is R2,9-billion for 23 340 staff who were working in January. This staff salary figure, which includes a proposed six percent increase, is up by R890-million on the R2,1-billion figure budgeted for staff packages last year.
The figures are in a document titled Financial Monitoring Report: July 2005, which was considered by the city's mayoral committee on September 21 at a meeting at Zevenwacht wine estate.
It was signed by the city's executive director of finance, Ike Nxedlana, on August 16, and by executive director Achmat Ebrahim, head of the city secretariat, on September 2.
But on Wednesday city manager Wallace Mgoqi said that despite the fact that two of his Ikhwezi executive team had signed off the report, the mayoral committee had rejected it and had sent officials away to align staff budgets with the new structure.
He said the budget had not been worked out using the new city staff structure. Mgoqi did confirm the R2,9-billion figure, as well as the number of staff employed as of January.
He said the replacement report, which would be ready next month, was being written using guidelines that would give a clearer picture of the true state of affairs.
Mgoqi said the city could not continue to have its agenda set by low-level officials who sent in "reports coming from the bottom".
Last year the mayoral committee member for human resources, Joseph Thee, said a crucial objective of the staff rationalisation was to reduce labour costs: "The cost of employment amounts to 38 percent of our operating budget. That means that R2,11-billion of our budget is being spent on 27 000 staff and 2 500 contract workers and labour brokers. That is unacceptable," he said.
Commenting on the projected overspending of R70-million, Mgoqi and another two officials said this had been a worst-case scenario.
Attached to the report are recommendations of the finance and economic development mayoral sub-committee that met on September 14.
And it appears that mayoral committee member Maatjie Malan thought the report was of "grave concern".
The document attached to the report showed that she told the meeting she was unable to support recommendations relating to the staff budget and that "the shortfall on staff remuneration should have been better monitored by Ikhwezi".
It added: "Alderman Malan also expressed grave concern with the slow rate of actual spending (R37 659 326) on capital projects in relation to the planned spending (R182 126 865)."
Clifford Sitonga, the mayoral committee member for economic development, also requested that the slow rate of capital spending be placed on the agenda for discussion at the forthcoming Mayco/Ikhwezi lekgotla.
Even Nxedlana had said at the sub-committee meeting that the "content of the report was reason for concern".
Referring to the part of the report which deals with cost-cutting measures, including prohibiting overtime, the DA's Stuart Pringle said: "The fact that overtime work has been prohibited in a desperate attempt to find the money needed is bad enough, but even emergency work may now only be performed with permission from the directors, which could result in fatal delays.
"Money which could have been better spent on more nurses and metro police officers is now being used to fuel the gravy train."