eThekwini Municipality faces scrutiny over alarming fuel management practices

Ethekwini Municipality’s fuel consumption bill came under the spotlight at an Executive Committee (Exco) meeting, on Tuesday, with R86 million spent in 2025. 

The eThekwini city fleet monthly report for March 2025 presented to the eThekwini Finance committee, last week, detailed the fuel consumption for the municipal fleet of 9240 vehicles including 565 Durban Transport buses and heavy construction plant items. The units allocated the most vehicles are; water and sanitation unit - 2074; electricity department -1850 ; Parks - 860; and Cleansing and Solid Waste (CSW) - 858.

The municipality fuel consumption analysis report between January 2025 and March 2025 amounted to R86 million. The report also detailed the total distance travelled by each department and cost of fuel in the three months. The city fleet also used an estimated 4.3 million litres of fuel and travelled an estimated 17.6 million kilometers in three months.  

The fleet provides vehicles for the CSW,  community participation, electricity; fire and emergency services; health; Metro police; roads and storm-water and other municipal departments. 

To mitigate some of the problems, the municipality stated that they have onboard vehicle monitoring equipment that records speeding and tracks the vehicles location. This information enables the city to monitor and improve driver behaviour which helps to reduce operating costs. Vehicles are also not allowed to leave the eThekwini area without permission. Notifications of usage are sent to the line managers daily while monthly reports are escalated to departmental heads. 

The eThekwini municipality Audit Risk Committee (ARC) report for the second quarter ended 30 December 2024 presented to Exco, on Tuesday, also expressed concerns about fuel management. Siboniso Shabalala, chairperson of the ARC, stated that they were very concerned with the control environment around fuel management for the fleet based on the findings tabled by an internal audit. 

“Internal audit also secured responses from the line departments so that there is implementation of the additional controls and monitoring required to arrest the challenges in this function,” he said. 

Shabalala said the ARC noted that while there was inaction by line departments regarding excessive usage utilising the reports from City Fleet, there are instances where line departments have taken consequence management with referrals to City Integrity and Investigations Unit (CIIU) and suspension of employees.

The report also highlights long outstanding critical issues that the ARC draws executive leadership to, which requires effort to resolve to continually strengthen the control environment and prevent unnecessary risks from materialising.

The eThekwini city manager, Musa Mbhele, said they will be daily monitoring taking place due to the amount of spend on fuel to keep this cost in check and ensure that challenges are dealt with immediately in line with the recently updated standard operating procedure (SOP) on fuel management. 

zainul.dawood@inl.co.za