Phokwane Local Municipality in the Northern Cape accumulated R395 million in irregular expenditure that could not be supported by a single document. When auditors attempted to verify the spending, they found no invoices, no contracts, no delivery notes, and no payment approvals for the vast majority of transactions. The municipality had essentially spent hundreds of millions of rand with no record of what was purchased or who was paid.
The governance failure was so complete that the Northern Cape provincial government recommended the dissolution of the municipal council — the most drastic intervention available under the Constitution. The National Council of Provinces (NCOP) debated and approved the dissolution in September 2023, ordering fresh by-elections. It was one of only a handful of council dissolutions in South African democratic history.
Beyond the irregular expenditure, the municipality failed to deliver basic services: water supply was erratic, sewage systems non-functional, and roads deteriorated beyond repair. The dissolution was not merely a financial accountability measure but an acknowledgment that the entire governance structure had failed beyond rescue. The by-election that followed brought new councillors, but the underlying capacity crisis — no skilled financial staff, no functioning IT systems, no institutional memory — remains.