Pretoria - Tshwane mayor Cilliers Brink has hit out at the head of the parliamentary select committee on co-operative governance and traditional affairs, China Dodovu, saying he was “blissfully ignorant of his own contribution to the City of Tshwane’s financial woes”.
This comes after Dodovu and the committee expressed strong views regarding the metro’s financial situation following their oversight visit last week to municipalities in Gauteng, including Tshwane.
Dodovu said the committee highlighted that the lack of financial management in the City “requires urgent action to resolve”, according to a statement released at the weekend.
The committee’s concerns were raised in the wake of the auditor-general’s adverse opinion incurred by the metro for the 2021/22 financial year.
Dodovu said: “The main challenge is the lack of appetite to implement effective consequence management, which then encourages a self-seeking culture of corruption and undermining of service delivery.”
He also criticised the City’s financial situation, saying it was an “embarrassment”.
Yesterday, Brink said: “A second-rate political apparatchik of the first order, Dodovu clearly has no sense of his own contribution to the City’s financial woes, nor does he have any shame. In the financial year that the City’s council was dissolved and placed under provincial administration, the City had a budget surplus exceeding R200 million.”
He said under the administration headed by Mpho Nawa for seven months, the City suffered a budget deficit exceeding R4 billion.
The dissolution of the council was eventually set aside by the Constitutional Court in October 2020.
Brink said during the committee’s visit he was candid about the challenges that the City had to overcome in achieving financial recovery.
“The City manager and I gave a detailed presentation on what we have undertaken to secure the City’s financial sustainability,” he said.
He said throughout the engagement Dodovu never posed any questions “nor did he seem to have much understanding of local government”.
“At the end of the meeting, Mr Dodovu made a long, rambling speech in which he referred to the ‘unlawful act’ of the City’s unfunded budget, apparently ignorant of the City’s funding plan which had just been presented to him in some detail. The National Treasury has also endorsed this plan,” he said.
Pretoria News