The Deputy Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment, Maggy Sotyu, said her department has been utilising part of the forfeited grants to reinvest in municipalities to improve service delivery.

ActionSA provincial chairperson, Patricia Kopane, slammed Free State municipalities who have failed to utilise conditional grants from the National Treasury, running into millions of rands meant for service delivery. She said 17 municipalities in the province had forfeited R171 million of the allocated conditional grants for the 2022/23 financial year.

In November 2023, the Mangaung Mayor Gregory Nthatisi rubbished claims that the Treasury requested R200 million to be returned after the municipality failed to utilise it appropriately and said the matter was a subject of discussion between the metro and the department.

In her recent visit to the province, Sotyu said her department took steps to convince the Treasury to utilise forfeited amounts for environmental affairs in those municipalities.

“We know that in most municipalities the grant is being sent back to the Treasury. When we checked as a department, we saw these grants need to be extended to be used for the environmental needs in these municipalities. We made sure we use this grant to buy some of the trucks used at these municipalities,” she added.

Sotyu explained Mangaung returned R501 million to Treasury for the 2020/21 financial year and her department requested the Treasury to return part of the money to the municipality to utilise it for environmental needs.

“Out of our discussions with the National Treasury it was decided the money will rather be given to us as a department to help Mangaung. We said it is going to be very difficult for us to babysit Mangaung. We would rather send the money to them in a way of a vote and decide how the money would be used. I think so far we have given you more than R160 million of that R500 million because we could eventually not convince them to give us the whole amount,” Sotyu said.

In November 2023, Sotyu disclosed her department spent R200 million in Mangaung to help with service delivery challenges. The department recruited 2,100 volunteers who will be paid a R2,700 monthly stipend with a 12-month contract, while R68 million was spent on the fleet which was handed over to the metro.

Late in 2022, Sotyu handed over a single waste truck worth R3 million to the Masilonyana municipality. Accompanied by the mayor of Masilonyana, Sotyu said the handover of the truck forms part of the National Yellow Waste and Landfill Management fleet which the department purchased as a waste management intervention to address waste collection services and illegal dumping for selected municipalities across the country.

OFM News/Kekeletso Mosebetsi