DA leader Mmusi Maimane took a hard line on Tuesday on the political impasse in the Nelson Mandela Bay metro, saying that process should not be above principle.
UDM leader Bantu Holomisa has threatened court action to reinstate former UDM deputy mayor Mongameli Bobani into the position from which he was removed through a motion of no confidence last week.
Holomisa had initially threatened that the UDM would leave the Nelson Mandela Bay coalition if Bobani is not reinstated, but the coalition is still standing.
If the UDM had left the coalition, the metro would be governed by a hung council, as the DA and its other coalition partners in the metro, COPE, ACDP and the Patriotic Alliance (PA), have 60 seats between them.
For a majority government, the council needs 61 seats, which the coalition already had before the PA became an official coalition partner in the metro.
Maimane said they had not yet received any court papers, but that the message Holomisa sent in his letters was that it was about process and not about the challenge of corruption.
"Principle should always stand," Maimane said.
Maimane was addressing the media with the DA mayors from Johannesburg, Tswhane, Nelson Mandela Bay and Cape Town.
Nelson Mandela Bay mayor Athol Trollip said Maimane and the DA did not accede to Holomisa’s threat about withdrawing from the coalition, as the council has been hung for months due to the UDM not voting with the coalition.
One of the reasons they had wanted to oust Bobani, is that he voted with the ANC or the EFF on issues against the coalition.
"The fact of the matter is that for the last eight months, instead of having 61 people voting for us in council, we’ve only had 59. For all intents and purposes, the UDM extracted themselves in January from this coalition," Trollip said.
He said they had tried for eight months to deal with the "chaotic instability" caused by Bobani in the council.
Maimane has said in one of the letters that have been sent back and forth between him and Holomisa, that there was "prima facie" evidence for maladministration, fraud and tender irregularities in two separate forensic reports involving departments directly under the political and operational authority of Bobani.
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