Western Cape provincial minister of local government Richard Dyantyi’s move to change Cape Town’s system of government is a blatant abuse of power with serious implications for South Africa as whole, city mayor Helen Zille said on Tuesday.
She was reacting to a letter Dyantyi sent her earlier in the day, announcing that he was considering scrapping the current mayoral committee system, in which Zille holds executive power, and replacing it with an executive committee.
Zille said the African National Congress (ANC) and its ally, the Independent Democrats (ID), would have a majority in a 10-member exco.
In a statement read on behalf of the city’s multiparty government (MPG), she said the MPG would fight Dyantyi’s move all the way to the Constitutional Court if necessary.
”We will resist this abuse of power with everything it takes,” she said.
”We will not lie down like doormats and enable the ANC to take back without a single bit of resistance the only major city where they lost.”
Zille’s Democratic Alliance won 91 seats in the 210-member council in this year’s local government polls. The ANC took 81, the ID 22, and the African Christian Democratic Party and other parties threw in their lot with the DA to form a fragile ruling alliance.
Dyantyi said in a media statement that his proposal was motivated by a desire for a stable and inclusive city government that represented a far greater proportion of the electorate than the current one did.
Zille said she had ”every good reason” to believe Dyantyi’s move was discussed at a recent meeting of the ANC’s Western Cape executive attended by party leader Thabo Mbeki, ”and that the instruction for this letter to be sent comes from the very highest levels of the ANC”.
”And that is what makes it even more disturbing.”
Though there were some democrats in the ANC, others seemed to believe the party had a divine right to rule everywhere, all the time.
”The implications are so grave, for South Africa being seen to fail the biggest test of democracy since 1994, because that’s actually what’s happening here,” she said.
Dyantyi said in his letter that the change would be done in terms of the Local Government: Municipal Structures Act.
He said he intended to consult Zille on the proposal within the next seven days.
Zille said she would first get a mandate from the MPG and the full council, and proceed on legal advice at every step of the way.
She said though the act did ”purport” to give the provincial minister the power to change the system in any municipality, it had never been done other than at the request of the municipality, and never to effectively overturn an election result.
”So those are major issues that bring constitutional issues into play, and that is what we want tested.”
The South African Local Government Association, which was also notified by Dyantyi of the proposed change, has called a special meeting of its Western Cape executive for Friday to consider the issue.
In a statement issued on Tuesday afternoon, the provincial ANC welcomed Dyantyi’s move.
Provincial deputy secretary Max Ozinsky said there was a need for an inclusive system representative of all the people of the city.
”The recent local government election did not produce a clear winner and at the moment only half of the voters are represented in the mayoral committee, leaving the other half outside.
”What we do need in Cape Town is a system that is inclusive, allows for broad-based representivity and can bring about a government model that encourages unity in a fractured city,” Ozinsky said. — Sapa