skills | Radio 94.7 FM

The Auditor-General, Kimi Makwetu, pointed out the big sore in the economy of the country.

In his latest report, he shows that politicians and officials simply ignore his office’s recommendations.

The other truth that emerges is that municipal councils do not have the necessary skills to handle finance.

Only 18 of the 257 municipalities in the country received clean audits, a worsening of the 33 who received clean reports in 2015 – 2016.

Almost 33% of the councils spend more than they bring in which is a total debt of R5.8bn. Unauthorized R1.3 billion is water under the bridge that will never be recovered.

North West, Limpopo and the Free State have no municipality that received a clean audit. Then add the R9.12bn debt to Eskom and R5.85bn to the Water Council by councils then paint a pale picture of the state of the country’s municipalities.

Then, in the 2017-18 financial year, 18% of the Councils did not
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Prolonged low economic growth could lead to even more economic flight by those with skills and capital, regardless of racial grouping.

Is South Africa’s “radical transformation” from a leader to a laggard in the upper middle-income countries the cause or the result of a brain drain? It is hard to tell. What is certain is that there is an extremely strong inverse correlation.

It is so strong that one can use one statistic to deduce the other – and if high-skilled emigration continues, the country’s decline towards the ranks of the lower middle-income countries will also continue.

According to World Bank data on upper middle-income countries, South Africa’s per capita GDP was 61.1% higher than the average in 1995. In 2017, South Africa was no longer a leader in this band of countries, but a laggard. Our per capita GDP had shrunk to 75.7% of the average.

During this time, the number of SA-born residents in high-income countries (
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