Colleen Makhubele
Knock, knock, Councillor Randall Williams? Any councillors out there in the City of Tshwane? Minority parties in Tshwane: it’s time to rise and perform your duly elected duties! The multiparty arrangement of a technical team has no constitutional duty over the Metros and their affairs and certainly not the jurisdiction to investigate and review City (of) Tshwane’s AG reports and its affairs! The mayor and his team must report to the City of Tshwane Council.
It seems the multiparty group is stumbling from one crisis to the next, desperately failing to rein in the Gauteng metros. When the mayor of the City of Tshwane, Randall Williams, was fighting allegations of corruption and impropriety relating to a pending power contract, and accused of “bullying” opposition leaders into endorsing an unsolicited tender, the noisy, self-appointed ‘Multiparty Technical Council’ embarked on some “sideline, neither here nor there” investigation for public display on Mayor Williams’s conduct. From their boardroom, they appointed their investigators to look into the City of Tshwane affairs. They thereafter sat in their hut and processed the outcomes of their investigations, then pronounced Mayor Randall was exonerated. What a multi circus!
The City of Tshwane is a very important and strategic city in this nation to be left hijacked and run in an unconstitutional “Kangaroo Court” style. We are calling on City of Tshwane councillors to take back their constitutional council responsibility to govern, provide oversight and hold the mayor and the executive accountable. Councillors are elected by the residents and the constituencies of Tshwane and must be left to discharge their duties without unconstitutional interference of political arrangements in boardrooms.
It is shocking that Williams was expected to lead his team of MMCs, who are paid by the ratepayers of Tshwane, to a meeting to brief the multiparty coalition’s national structure about the auditor-general’s (AG) adverse audit report stemming from the municipality’s disastrous financial management contained in the 2021/22 financial year report. Who is this multiparty coalition’s national structure in the City of Tshwane Council structure?
When will Mayor Williams and his team go to every region and ward in Tshwane to brief the residents who gave them the mandate to represent them in council?
Who is actually running the City of Tshwane? It is not surprising that the financial reports presented a bleak picture of the City’s financial management, with irregular expenditure of R10.4 billion and fruitless and wasteful expenditure understated by R1bn. The mayor and his team seemingly account to a multiparty coalition national structure somewhere outside of the council and its legislated structures.
The minority parties and councillors of Tshwane must stand up and resist this unconstitutional interference in the affairs of their own council.
It is a pity that the critical constitutional role of councillors in Tshwane is overshadowed by the “self-elected council” of multiparty coalition national structure with their endless noisy and absurd statements of defending, deflecting and denials, instead of the mayor and his team accounting in council and to the residents of Tshwane and the nation. We are all demanding answers, leadership and accountability than what got this far. The briefing of the multiparty coalition national structure and the firing of the chief financial officer of the City is not sufficient, taking into account the amounts of monies being mentioned in the AG’s report.
The multiparty coalition now knows from their little experience that governing and running a City is very different from sitting in opposition, issuing media statements, taking people to court and drafting trending Twitter posts… This requires skills, capacity and intelligence, and it is clearly lacking in their choice of deployees to the City.
*Cope Cllr Colleen Makhubele, Speaker of the City of Joburg.