Municipal review: auditing the 2025/26 budgets
Poor-quality budget documents and numbers that don't add up
The new municipal financial year (the 2025/26 year) starts in July. Municipalities were required to upload their draft budgets to their websites by 1 April to give their citizens an opportunity to interrogate the budgets and give feedback.
Most municipalities did make their draft budgets available, complying with the relevant legislation, but many did the bare minimum. Some municipalities provided a single, poor-quality PDF document which would require most readers to tease out the numbers in a labour-intensive way, possibly transcribing the budget with a pen and paper or painstakingly copying the information into a spreadsheet to analyse.
We went through the exercise of cleaning as much of the data as we could for the six biggest metro municipalities. We had the advantage of years of experience in analysing public finances, and it still took days to create a partial analysis of the new budgets. Many hours were consumed with simply cleaning the data and preparing it in spreadsheets that a computer could analyse.
This post is an update of our municipal website audits. It was not possible, given the time constraints, to clean data beyond the operating budget - some of the metros did not even provide a detailed breakdown of their capital grants.
We can certainly empathise with the Auditor-General, who has also complained about having to do some of the metros’ financial analysis for them.
There are also the now-standard caveats about the trustworthiness of the budget numbers. Two of the six metros showed fundamental flaws in calculating the amount of their operating expenditure: for eThekwini and Nelson Mandela Bay, the sum of their expenditure line items was significantly lower than the stated expenditure total.
Again, we only found these fundamental flaws by cleaning the data and analysing it in a spreadsheet. It is not clear whether the quality and accessibility of the budget documents is poor by design or by neglect, but it is a very bad look for the metros.
Auditing the draft budget documents
The table below scores the six largest municipalities on how accessible their draft 2025/26 budget documents are to the average South African. We asked three questions:
How easy is it to find the budget documents? We measured how much time it takes to find the budget page, if there is one. Failing that, is there a search function that is easy to use?
Are the budget documents easily accessible? Once we found the documents, were they arranged in a way that was easy to digest? Were the files arranged chronologically and are the budget documents separated into their individual components (e.g., tariffs, IDP documents, budgeted numbers) or are they lumped together into a single PDF file that runs to hundreds of pages?
Ideally, all documents would be machine-readable, that is, able to be interpreted by the computer without too many person-hours spent cleaning the data and arranging it in spreadsheets. Unfortunately, no metro did this: all files were in a PDF format which required extensive cleaning.
What is the quality of the documents? If the documents are not machine-readable, are they high-quality PDF documents, converted directly from Word or similar software, or are they poor-quality scans.
The poorer the quality of the documents, the more work is needed to clean them, including the use of premium conversion tools which may be beyond the budget of most people.
Again, Nelson Mandela Bay and Ekurhuleni are the gold standard for having websites that are easy to navigate with accessible documents, while Tshwane and eThekwini have particularly exasperating websites that are user-unfriendly.
Johannesburg’s budget book runs to 254 pages. The city does not give a clear breakdown of its capital revenue, particularly the transfers and grants from national government.
Tshwane’s draft budget is bundled up in a single scanned PDF document that runs to over a thousand pages. The quality of the document is so poor that you will need professional conversion tools to extract the numbers from it.
The Ekurhuleni website is relatively easy to navigate, and the budget documents are clearly labelled. The quality of the documents is reasonable, including the budget book.
The eThekwini website is still a frustrating affair, with no chronological organisation of its budget documents. The 2025/26 medium-term revenue and expenditure framework (MTREF) is bundled as a single PDF document. As in the case of Tshwane, a researcher will need professional scraping tools to make sense of the numbers. The document is literally eye-watering, with poorly formatted tables that have been badly resized.
The line items for operational revenue do not add up to the budgeted total; they are off by about R3 billion. Total operational expenditure is also R700 million higher than the sum of the line items.
The Cape Town budget portal is not immediately clear on the website but the search function is easy to use if you know what you are looking for. Unfortunately, the documents are not clearly organised when using the search portal. The budget book runs to almost 300 pages.
The Nelson Mandela Bay website remains a joy to use, and the budget book is only 73 pages long. Unfortunately, the expenditure figures for the R19.5 billion operating budget only add up to R16.7 billion.
Most of the budgets will be passed in council, meeting the 1 July deadline, even if their headline numbers make no sense. If an entire planning department cannot balance its numbers, and a whole IT department uploads unusable documents without a second thought, what hope is there for effective budget oversight during the fifth and final year of the current administration?