The cash-strapped City of Johannesburg will soon approve a R2bn loan facility from the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA), which it previously rejected during DA councillor Mpho Phalatse’s tenure as executive mayor.
Al Jama-ah councillor Thapelo Amad, who was on Monday sworn in as first citizen of Joburg, said: “We are inheriting a city under massive financial strain. The stabilisation of the city’s finances is to be prioritised.” He said his administration would place “great emphasis” on its administrative organs to collect what’s due to the city for it to meet its service delivery objectives.
The R2bn DBSA short-term loan facility is critical to stabilising the city’s finances as the metro has been struggling to pay service providers, leading to the withdrawal of some of is leased fleet as the cashflow crunch deepened.
In November 2022, the then-minority parties rejected a move to approve the DBSA loan, saying at the time the metro did not require a short-term loan and that the R2bn loan facility appeared to be a quick fix” to fund the metro’s financial obligations such as payment of staff salaries.
That move was seen by critics and political pundits as being aimed at plunging the metro into more financial trouble in order for the ANC to wrest back control of the municipality from a DA-led coalition.
There are fears that if no short-term solution is found, the city will struggle to pay staff salaries for its estimated 32,000-strong workforce. It will also fail to honour its service delivery obligations to the 6-million residents in the metro.
Attempts by the council to pass the DBSA loan facility failed late in 2022 after the ANC and some smaller parties voted against the report.
Amad, who previously served as the metro’s development planning member of the mayoral committee (MMC), said: “We are going to approve [the DBSA loan]. We will consult opposition parties [in council], it’s up to them [to support it] [but] we have capacity to approve that loan and stabilise the city.”
He said Joburg would aim to improve its revenue collection in all its regions.
Residents needed to pay for what they consumed to “assist the city generate revenue to be channelled through to service delivery [programmes]”, the mayor said.
On the issue of energy, Amad said he would pursue an energy mix policy to address the issue of load-shedding, which has crippled the economy. A lot of factories and small businesses have closed down due to unreliable power supply that has seen consumers living with no electricity for up to 10 hours a day.
“We will look beyond Eskom to guarantee energy for our people and businesses,” the executive mayor said, adding that renewable energy would also be explored.
Amad said accelerated service delivery would define his tenure as Joburg mayor. “We will fix the ageing infrastructure, especially our roads, the stormwater drainage system. We will clean our city and remove refuse according to schedule,” he said.
Gauteng premier and ANC provincial chair Panyaza Lesufi called on the new mayor to put residents’ interests first. “We want to stabilise all three metros [of Gauteng],” he said, taking issue that Joburg had been without a city manager “for three years”, as that position was critical in the running of the municipality.
In Ekurhuleni, said Panyaza, “we are moving the speaker and chief whip”. Ekurhuleni council speaker Raymond Dhlamini successfully applied to the Johannesburg high court on Monday to stop a planned special council meeting scheduled for Monday in which he was set to face a motion of no confidence.
“They are postponing the inevitable,” Panyaza said of the court challenge. “They [DA] don’t believe it that they are going to lose the municipalities [all] at once,” the premier said.
In a statement on Sunday, the EFF said its structures resolved that the 10-year old political party “must no longer be on the touch lines of governance, and that the EFF must begin to occupy meaningful roles of responsibility in local municipalities”.
“The door is therefore open by the EFF for engagements on how best to structure coalition agreements in the municipalities, for all those who are interested in achieving stability and service delivery in our communities,” the EFF said.
“The EFF maintains that the current composition of political party leadership in the metropolitans in Gauteng is informed by white supremacist entitlement. It is illogical for the DA to lead all major metropolitans, while not giving meaningful roles of responsibility to any of its coalition partners.”
The opposition political party said it would continue to participate in the “removal of the DA across all metros to establish governments that will be transparent, accountable and humble. The EFF will during the course of this year be accepting leadership responsibilities of speakers, mayors, and members of mayoral committees in different municipalities”.
“We want to demonstrate to the people of SA that we are party that is capable to govern impactfully, ethically and without any form of corruption,” the EFF said.
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