Tshwane council speaker Murunwa Makwarela has allayed fears that SA’s capital city is rudderless following the resignation of the executive mayor and his committee, saying the metro continued delivering “enhanced” services to communities.
Makwarela said a replacement for DA councillor Randall Williams would be elected as a matter of urgency and stressed that the city manager was in office so “there is nothing stopping”.
“The idea is to elect a new mayor who will in turn appoint a mayoral committee, so there is political leadership in the work the city is doing,” he said.
In the absence of a mayoral committee, the law allows the city manager to take over decision-making.
Williams resigned with immediate effect on February 13, saying his exit was in the best interests of the council’s multiparty coalition.
Just hours later, Williams said that after consultation with various political parties and to ensure the continuity of the council’s work, “I have subsequently written to the speaker and chief whip and amended my resignation to take effect from midnight on February 28.”
The Tshwane metro said in a statement on Monday that a legal opinion confirmed Williams’s initial resignation “was valid and took effect on midnight of the same day”.
“The consequence of this turn of events is that the mayoral committee has been dissolved with effect from midnight of February 13,” the city said.
Williams’s resignation comes after the DA-led multiparty coalition — which included ActionSA, the ACDP, the IFP, COPE and Freedom Front Plus — issued a joint statement in August 2022 that they had agreed to an independent investigation after allegations that Williams interfered in a R26bn energy investment proposal for the metro. The unsolicited bid was for refurbishing the city-owned Rooiwal and Pretoria West power stations.
Randall also came under heavy criticism after auditor-general Tsakani Maluleke’s report on the metro’s 2021/2022 financial year said it did not have adequate systems for identifying and disclosing all irregular expenditure, which the metro put at more than R10.4bn.
The instability of coalitions in the Gauteng metros echoes concerns by the SA Local Government Association that service delivery in province was deteriorating as political parties battled for controls of local councils and municipalities.
Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi, in his maiden state of the province address at the Johannesburg City Hall on Monday, said the situation in Tshwane was “worrying”, as the metro “is struggling to pay Eskom, and the latest auditor-general report has painted a bleak picture of a collapsing municipality”.
“We will intervene in that municipality as a matter of urgency. Let me take this opportunity to bid farewell to the mayor of Tshwane whom I never had the opportunity to meet,” Lesufi said.
Makwarela said Lesufi’s remarks about Tshwane had “cut too deep”, but conceded that the provincial government was well within its rights to intervene when municipalities failed to discharge their duties.
In October 2021, the Constitutional Court declared unwarranted, unnecessary and unlawful a decision by the Gauteng provincial government in March 2020 to place Tshwane under administration after the municipal council failed to convene and retain the necessary quorum from September 2019 after walkouts by ANC and EFF councillors.
The judgment effectively makes it difficult for a provincial government to place a municipality under administration without satisfying all the constitutional provisions of doing so.
Makwarela said a council meeting scheduled for Thursday had been postponed as the “focus shifts to convening a special meeting to elect a new mayor. A date will be determined by the speaker of council.”
Pressed on how soon the meeting would be convened, the speaker said: “As soon as yesterday but there are processes that must be followed [of] dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s” to ensure everything was done according to the law.
Makwarela said he was committed to good governance and enhanced service delivery. “We will make sure a mayor will be elected in due course to ensure the city’s priorities are at the forefront,” Makwarela said.
Nkhetheni Muthavhi, regional chair of the SA Municipal Workers’ Union, the country’s largest worker representative in the local government sector, called on parties in council to “put aside their political differences and put the city first by electing a mayor who, working with the new executive, will bring the much-needed financial stability and resuscitate service delivery that will benefit all residents indiscriminately.”
The city needed to be revitalised to its former glory, he said.
Update: February 21 2023
This story has been updated with new information.
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