/ 10 January 2006

Cape Town mayor comes out swinging

The Democratic Alliance paid its own city manager a R196 000 bonus just three years ago, Cape Town mayor Nomanidia Mfeketo said on Tuesday.

She was replying to Democratic Alliance mayoral candidate Helen Zille, who revealed earlier in the day that four of the city’s current top managers earned bonuses last year that pushed their before-tax earnings to over a million rand each.

”[This was] the same year that the metro was placed on national government’s Project Consolidate programme for dysfunctional municipalities,” Zille told a media briefing.

Mfeketo said Zille’s remarks should be viewed with ”cynical derision”.

”While she is making a big issue of the current city manager’s performance bonus, the DA paid the city manager they employed when they were managing the city [Robert Maydon] a bonus of R196 000 — and that was three years ago.

”This, in spite of the fact that there was no performance management system in place and no performance assessment was done…

”For the record, the DA employed the previous city manager and paid him more than R1,2-million a year.

”If he had remained in the employ of the city under the DA administration he probably would be earning more than R2-million today.”

When the ANC took over the city, it reduced the city manager’s salary to R860 000 a year — the lowest of all metros in the country.

”Today his salary is R966 000 — still less than what the DA paid their city manager three years ago,” she said.

She also said it was ”transparent nonsense” that the City of Cape Town was part of Project Consolidate.

Cape Town was one of the most affluent municipalities in the country, with a budget of R18-billion this financial year, that was responsibly managed.

Only the settlements of Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain, which were conceived as apartheid dormitories, and were presidential nodes in terms of the urban renewal programme, had been targeted to benefit from Project Consolidate.

Zille said earlier that city manager Wallace Mgoqi received a bonus of R186 011,98 on top of his salary of R966 296,04 and a car allowance of R90 000.

”Similar bonuses were handed to three other top management figures, perhaps the most disturbing of which was the R178 832,50 paid to the executive director of transport, roads and planning, Mike Marsden, on top of his salary of R929 000,04,” she said.

”This in spite of the declining state of roads and the dismal state of the rail system in Cape Town.”

Project Consolidate, she said, was targeted at municipalities that had severe service delivery backlogs, could not collect enough revenue, performed less than 30% of their assigned functions and were in known financial distress — ”all the symptoms of mismanagement”.

She said that if the DA was voted in to run the city in the coming polls, it would ensure that remuneration of city managers was linked to how well they did their jobs.

”The bottom line is, what are the ratepayers getting in return for their rates. And if they’re getting a hopeless service, someone has to carry the can,” she said.

She said it would be inappropriate at this stage for her to say which individuals deserved to be in their jobs, and which did not.

”The fact of the matter is, there has to be a legally compliant, performance appraisal system that has consequences, positive or negative, and that we will seek to get into place in our first hundred days in office.” – Sapa