Voters head to polls with lifestyle audit rules years away

The Lifestyle Audit Regulations will not be ready when voters go to the polls on November 4, and the residents of South Africa’s 257 municipalities will have to wait years longer for a tool many see as essential to rooting out corruption in their local councils.

Public Service and Administration Minister Mzamo Buthelezi confirmed the delay to Parliament this week. The regulations, he said, will not be completed before the local government elections. He was answering questions from Democratic Alliance MP Marina van Zyl, who has been pressing the government on the pace of the reforms.

For van Zyl, the timeline is troubling. Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa has confirmed that lifestyle audit regulations for local government will only be finalised by the end of the 2028/29 financial year. “Even more concerning, the workstreams dealing with ethics and consequence management have not yet convened and have no finalised deadlines. With corruption and financial misconduct crippling municipalities, South Africa cannot afford another three years of processes and committees,” she said.

Her concern speaks directly to communities whose councils have been weakened by financial misconduct. Van Zyl added that her party believes lifestyle audits, particularly for senior municipal officials, must be urgently implemented. “If the government is serious about cleaning up local government, officials with unexplained wealth must be identified, investigated and held accountable,” she said.

At present, lifestyle audits are not mandatory in the local government sphere. Councillors and senior management officials must make financial disclosures under the Municipal Structures Act, but the audits themselves sit outside the municipal framework. The government now wants to change that, extending the audits beyond national and provincial government to all 257 municipalities.

Behind the scenes, the machinery is being built. Buthelezi revealed that senior management representatives from his department, Cogta and the South African Local Government Association (Salga) met last month to establish a task team charged with aligning ethics management, discipline management and lifestyle audits across the three spheres of government.

“The primary objective of this collaboration is to develop appropriate regulations under the Public Administration Management Act with the Lifestyle Audit Regulations identified as the first priority,” he said.

The task team has agreed to establish three technical workstreams, covering Ethics Management, Discipline Management and Lifestyle Audits. Each is represented by the Department of Public Service, Cogta and Salga, and overseen by a coordinating team drawn from the three institutions. An executive committee has also been set up to provide strategic oversight, serving as the clearing house for the workstreams and reporting to the respective directors-general.

The technical working group on lifestyle audits has already begun drafting the regulations, which will be followed by consultation with relevant stakeholders, including public participation processes. “It is envisaged that the consultation, approval and finalisation process for the Lifestyle Audit Regulations will be completed by the end of the 2028/29 financial year,” Buthelezi said.

He defended the pace, saying the regulations are a complex undertaking that requires consultation and concurrence among multiple stakeholders to align the legal framework across the three spheres of government. “Any final regulations will require concurrence by the Minister for the Public Service and Administration, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Cogta, and the chairperson of Salga,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Ethics Management and Discipline Management workstreams have not yet convened, since the initial priority is the Lifestyle Audit Regulations.

The groundwork for the current push was laid last year, when Hlabisa confirmed that his department, together with Salga and the Department of Public Service and Administration, was analysing the local government legislative framework to determine whether it could support municipal-level lifestyle audits. He also acknowledged a gap in basic record-keeping at the time. “The department does not possess information that identifies municipalities that have enforced asset disclosures in each of the past five financial years,” he said.

For now, the residents of the country’s municipalities keep waiting for a reform that, on the government’s own timetable, remains years away. Whether November’s elections push any of that along is a question voters themselves will soon answer.