Port Shepstone municipal councillors were subjected to a lie detector test this week as they were all under suspicion of voting for the wrong mayoral candidate.
The municipality has been caught up in a drama of intrigue for the past three weeks, after no single party won a two-thirds majority in the council. The African National Congress won 28 seats while the Inkatha Freedom Party and the Democratic Alliance joined forces to boost their tally to 29. The remaining one seat went to the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP).
Following negotiations, the IFP and DA were in favour of splitting the three top positions of mayor, deputy mayor and speaker among the ANC, the IFP and the DA. IFP councillor Lynette Zwane was to be elected mayor, while a DA councillor would be named deputy mayor, and an ANC councillor would be given the speaker’s position.
ACDP councillor in the municipality Roger Evans gave his support to the move. However, whenever the council went to vote for the mayor’s position, the ANC ended up getting 29 votes. This led to much mud-slinging and name-calling within parties, and Evans was also accused of voting for the ANC, which he has categorically denied.
When three rounds of voting failed to produce a win for the DA/IFP alliance, senior party leaders proposed a lie detector test. DA leader Roger Burrows confirmed the test was taken by all councillors. “It was purely voluntary,” he said. The parties have not disclosed the findings of the test.
However, the ANC claims that five IFP members are under suspicion and “two are confirmed through the lie detector test as having voted for ANC candidates”. The parties went in for another round of voting on Thursday, which also resulted in a deadlock.
Port Shepstone is not the only municipality with a hung council that has failed to elect a mayor. There are five other municipalities where a deadlock over the election of office bearers persists: Scottburgh, also in KwaZulu-Natal, and four in the Western Cape Saldanha Bay, Laingsburg, Worcester and Robertson.
Scottburgh is expected to go in for its fifth round of voting today. If all these municipalities fail to produce a result by January 11, their office bearers are likely to be elected by the toss of a coin or the drawing of lots. And to enable municipalities to gamble with fate, the national Department of Provincial and Local Government has already drafted a notice in terms of the Municipal Structures Act making it all legally possible.
According to a letter issued by the Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi to some of these municipalities urging them to resolve the issue through negotiations, the regulations will make it mandatory for the election of office bearers by lot.