Time is ticking for the City of Ekurhuleni to convene a council meeting to elect an executive mayor. The African Independent Congress’s Sivuyile Ngodwana was removed last month in an ActionSA sponsored no confidence motion.
A council meeting was scheduled within seven days to elect a new mayor but was postponed at the eleventh hour, prompting Gauteng MEC for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (CoGTA) Mzi Khumalo to issue a warning of the dangers of the municipality being placed under administration.
The municipality has until the end of next week to elect a mayor after postponing last week’s meeting. MEC Khumalo says his office will not allow service delivery to suffer.
“So, this meeting collapse will follow the law. Very patient, give them another seven days to, at which point they must definitely elect the executive mayor. In case they fail to elect the executive mayor, we will look at other options to exercise and will be physically left with two options before us, firstly we partly dissolve the municipality that will be sent into administration.”
Meanwhile, the office of the city manager is bemoaning administrative delays due to the political instability playing out inside council. Public hearings meant to guide service delivery cannot be scheduled without a mayor in office.
These public hearings form part of local government’s efforts to meet residents service delivery needs.
“Of late, we’ve had quite a few challenges with the changes in the council. Currently one of the big challenges that we are facing is upcoming IDP which requires us to go on public participation and that usually happens with the executive would go out with the MMC, executive mayor interact with communities and find out what their service delivery needs and that gets compiled and combined into our budget,” says Ekurhuleni Communication Manager Phakamile Mbengashe.
With the revolving door of mayors which have left the city without an accounting officer, the office of the city manager has had to put in place contingency measures to prevent a potential collapse in the municipality.
“Include the governance performance index ranked us number two in terms of metros across the country and that’s mainly due to having an astute management of Mashazi. She’s got over 30 years of local government practitioner experience, she runs a tight ship and even on that index indicator which we performed best was leadership and management. So as an administration, the city manager has been able to put systems in place that make us resilient to political shocks,” Mbengashe adds.
Another council meeting has been scheduled for Thursday morning, a day before the deadline issued by the office of the Gauteng MEC for CoGTA.
