The message: stop with your lavish spending, flamboyance and flair

The trade union UASA is shocked at Treasury reports that South Africa’s municipalities could have saved up to R27bn from their 2009-10 budgets by eliminating "frills".

This excessive spending is an insult to the South African taxpayer.

The fact that this amounts to more than the R21bn municipalities received in their equitable share allocation from the Treasury in 2009/10 is despicable and an utter disgrace and shows that government leaders on national, provincial and local levels are not nearly doing enough to prevent the misappropriation of the tax contributions of hard working citizens.

UASA agrees with finance minister Pravin Gordhan’s statement at the release of the 2011 Local Government Budgets and Expenditure Review 2006-07 to 2012-13 yesterday that municipalities need to focus on delivering services, on building their capacity, on building economic infrastructure, investing the right amount in capital expenditure, and forget about frills like expensive cars.

The reported excessive sponsorships, public relations projects, excessive catering, expensive venues for workshops, foreign travel and luxurious offices are certainly not how the hard earned tax money of the South African workers should be spent.