Mashaba and Mayor Morero trade blame over Joburg’s financial failings

Herman Mashaba and Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero publicly clashed over responsibility for the city’s financial problems during a parliamentary briefing on the municipality’s 2024/25 audit outcomes.

Parliamentary showdown over leadership and accountability

The exchange took place at a joint meeting of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts and the Portfolio Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, where City of Johannesburg officials were briefing MPs on audit findings and corrective steps.

ActionSA MP Alan Beesley had asked Mayor Morero why his delegation to Parliament included chief operations officer and former acting city manager Tshepo Makola and the municipality’s head of Group Forensic and Investigation Services Sinaye Nxumalo, noting both were dismissed during Mashaba’s mayoral term from August 2016 to November 2019.

Morero rejects Mashaba’s allegations

Morero said Makola was appointed by the city and that allegations made against him by Mashaba had been followed by disciplinary and court processes that found him not guilty. He said a process also cleared Nxumalo of allegations that Mashaba had made, describing those allegations as “baseless and unsubstantiated.”

Morero told MPs that multiple cases remained in court of people clearing their names after allegations were made during Mashaba’s tenure. He cited a group of 126 employees in the city’s licensing department as having proved Mashaba wrong over allegations made against them.

Morero said the city’s decline in revenue collection was linked to employees in the revenue department deciding to stop working because they feared being accused of corruption by Mashaba. He defended Makola and Nxumalo as competent and said they had been proven so.

Mashaba stands by his actions as mayor

Mashaba dismissed Morero’s defence of the officials. He said that during his time as mayor he instituted a skills audit to remove staff appointed for connections rather than competence and that, in the process, “over 900 staff members were fired, criminal charges laid against them and some decided to jump ship before I could get to them.”

He said he had received media queries about removing experienced cadres and responded that he was removing “experienced fraudsters.”

On the city’s revenue performance, Mashaba invited MPs to compare the Auditor-General’s public reports for the years before his term with the three years of his mayoral term, saying those audited financials would allow independent judgment.

What was at stake

The briefing focused on the City of Johannesburg’s 2024/25 financial year audit outcomes and the steps taken to address and correct the audit findings. The parliamentary questions and back-and-forth highlighted competing accounts of leadership decisions, disciplinary processes and the causes of the municipality’s financial challenges.