Newly elected Tshwane executive mayor Cilliers Brink has announced his 10-member mayoral committee, which he described as fit-for-purpose, and said his administration would come up with a financial recovery plan to address the metro’s cashflow challenges.
The mayoral committee comprises councillors from the DA-led coalition and includes familiar faces such as former council speaker Katlego Mathebe (DA) who is now member of the mayoral committee (MMC) for roads and transport, while Peter Sutton (DA) returns to his former portfolio as finance MMC.
The MMC for corporate and shared services is Kingsley Wakelin (DA), with his ActionSA counterpart Hannes Coetzee deployed to the economic development and spatial planning portfolio.
DA councillor Themba Fosi is utilities and regional operations MMC, with IFP councillor Ziyanda Zwane appointed political head of the environment and agriculture portfolio.
The other appointments include Gradi Theunissen (FF Plus) as MMC for community safety; social development MMC Peggy de Bruin (ActionSA); human settlements MMC Ofentse Madzebatela (DA); and health MMC Rina Marx (FF Plus).
“I’m pleased to introduce this strong team of individuals that are fit for purpose, ethical and ready to serve the people of Tshwane,” Brink said during the media briefing, which he, together with the mayoral committee, hosted while standing up.
This was because the MMCs and the executive mayor needed to attend to a session on the adjustment budget after the briefing. “It’s important that we have a competent team that can hit the ground running,” the executive mayor said.
“We have tight deadlines such as the adjustment budget and the draft budget for the 2023/24 financial year. So, we must stay focused and put the interests of Tshwane residents ahead of everything else.”
Brink was elected Tshwane mayor on Tuesday with 109 votes, beating his close rival, COPE councillor Ofentse Moalusi, who received 102 votes. Tshwane had been without a political head for almost three weeks after former COPE councillor Murunwa Makwarela resigned on March 10 following the discovery that he had submitted a fraudulent court rehabilitation order to city manager Johan Mettler after his insolvency proceedings.
In his acceptance speech, Brink said his administration will focus on restoring the metro’s broken financial controls, which resulted in it racking up more than R10bn in irregular expenditure.
Brink said in the past three years that a number of factors including “excessive salary increases negotiated outside collective bargaining, and out of proportion to what has been granted in metros of similar size and means”; and the Covid-19 lockdown had had a “devastating effect on the city’s financial position, and the path of recovery on which we had embarked in the last decade”.
The metro came under fire from unions in August 2020 following its decision to withhold salaries of more than 7,000 unverified workers. The decision came two weeks after Tshwane agreed to implement a benchmarking agreement signed with the SA Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu), and the Independent Municipal and Allied Trade Union (Imatu), which was set to cost the city R300m. The agreement was meant to put Tshwane employees’ salaries on the same footing as those of their counterparts in the country’s seven other metros.
Answering questions from Business Day at the briefing on Friday, on just how he planned to restore the city’s broken financial controls, Brink said his team will come up with a credible finance recovery plan that would look at how much revenue the metro was collecting, how much it was spending for services, and whether it was getting value for money on projects and programmes it was engaged on.
“We have to make tough decisions about that,” he said, adding the metro will have a conversation about these issues with organised labour so that “Tshwane doesn’t fall in a permanent cashflow crunch”. He said the municipality was behind in its payments to service providers including to power utility Eskom.
“The level of scrutiny has to be extremely rigorous. We want value for money in what we collect in rates, tariffs and charges,” Brink said.
Brink, a University of Pretoria law graduate, is no stranger to the municipality, having served as a councillor in 2011 and group corporate and shared services MMC from 2016 to 2019.
Brink then moved to parliament and represented the official opposition party as national spokesperson and as co-operative governance and traditional affairs portfolio committee member.
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