ANC councillors are outraged by the KwaZulu-Natal government’s decision to intervene in the affairs of the eThekwini Municipality, saying the move is politically motivated and will undermine the metro in the eyes of investors and lenders.
Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) MEC, the Reverend Thulasizwe Buthelezi, announced last week that he was reviving the Section 154 intervention in the municipality.
Section 154 means that governance experts are being deployed to assist the municipality with service delivery. The metro has battled service delivery challenges and has struggled to spend its grants.
Local government experts, Durban’s former city manager Mike Sutcliffe and a former director-general in the Presidency, Cassius Lubisi, have been deployed to assist the council.
Speaking to “The Mercury,” Sutcliffe said they would start work on Monday and referred any further questions on the matter to the department.
The decision to impose a Section 154 intervention was taken by the last provincial administration, but Cogta MEC Bongi Sithole-Moloi was blocked from implementing it by ANC councillors.
Some ANC members said the decision announced on Thursday was deeply political and they view it as motivated by revenge.
When Cogta was led by the ANC, it put several IFP-led municipalities under administration, and now Cogta is led by the IFP.
“We are aware of the decision that was announced last week. The general feeling among the members is that they are not pleased about it, but the ANC is still to meet and discuss the issue,” said one councillor.
The ANC councillor said his colleagues who were part of the meeting were blindsided by what transpired.
“We understand that the ANC councillors that were deployed at Exco were not briefed by the province on the action that was to be announced. The feeling is that the province should at least have told them what was to happen.
“The second issue is that the announcement of Section 154 did not need to be announced so publicly. The Treasury does this all the time. By making a big public announcement on this, you send a wrong message to our stakeholders and investors that the municipality is in trouble,” said the councillor, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The ANC councillor described the decision as very political. “We were told about what transpired at the meeting, some very political things were said there. That is why we believe the decision was political. We believe it is payback time for all the things that the ANC did to the IFP municipalities.
“They (ANC councillors at the meeting) said they were informed that if they resisted Section 154, they could be put under administration. That is a threat, so that tells you the mood of that meeting,” said the source.
The councillor said ANC provincial executive committee was meeting this week, but all the other regional leaders had been invited. “I have learnt that the ANC leaders in the region plan to raise this matter.”
The ANC Exco leader in eThekwini Municipality, Nkosenhle Madlala, declined to comment on the matter.
“The ANC caucus in eThekwini has not met to discuss the issue. Once we have, we will issue a statement.”
The spokesperson of the MEC for Cogta, Senzo Mzila, said the MEC had met with ANC councillors at the meeting and they had not raised that view.
The Mercury