The Democratic Alliance (DA) in the Tshwane metro council this week handed in a motion of no confidence against the city’s executive mayor, Gwen Ramokgopa, calling for her immediate resignation.
Proposed by DA chief whip Natasha Michael, the motion puts forth a list of 20 issues that it claims the mayor failed to address, including billing chaos, alleged corruption in the housing and land department, failure to address illegal land invasions, chaos in the licensing department, and a lack of transparency in appointing senior officials.
”Every single one of those [20] points has been identified as a problem area,” Michael told the Mail & Guardian Online on Thursday, but she declined to comment further, saying that the matter first has to go before the council on October 26.
”Effective service delivery and treating the clients who are, in fact, our residents to quality service is not a maybe; it is a must-have element that the council is seriously lacking,” she said in a statement.
Council speaker Khorombi Dau said the motion will go before the 152-member council, which will decide whether it complies with council rules before a decision is made.
If the motion came under opposition from members of the council, which Michael said it probably would, the DA would have to motivate and defend its case against the mayor.
”We will not sit back and let our residents be abused. Our residents pay rates and taxes and, more importantly, our residents pay the executive mayor’s salary, and when you pay for a service you expect delivery,” Michael said in her statement.
Dissatisfaction
Chris van der Heyde, spokesperson for the National Democratic Convention (Nadeco) based in Pretoria, said the party is ”extremely dissatisfied with the levels of corruption in Tshwane”.
Van der Heyde said Ramokgopa had failed to react swiftly when certain Tshwane councillors were arrested for selling property stands some months ago, and that she still has not issued any notice about it.
He added that even though Ramokgopa has not done anything to prove she is able to do her job, ”at this point we [Nadeco] do not share the same feeling as the DA that she should be removed”.
”When a person says they have all the executive powers, you expect them to show it … She should act swiftly and transparently … She has to show that she can work for the man on the street,” Van der Heyde said.
Piet Uys, a Tshwane council member of the Freedom Front Plus, said the problems experienced under Ramokgopa’s authority would not be solved by removing her from her position as executive mayor.
”These problems were inherited by us and by the current mayor … replacing her will not change anything,” Uys told the M&G Online.
However, ”Talk is cheap, and when you are in a position of leadership such as the executive mayor, the buck stops with you,” Michael said in her statement. ”Any failure that occurs within the Tshwane metro is ultimately the executive mayor’s responsibility. As the political leader of the council, she has the ability to rectify situations.”
But Uys feels that the problems materialised as a result of the African National Congress (ANC) government’s plans to have everything in the municipality centrally managed. ”We would like to find a situation where there is a mayoral committee and not an executive mayor in charge of everything,” he said.
When asked for a comment regarding the proposed motion to dismiss the executive mayor, Richard Mkholo, chief director of communications in the Tshwane municipality, said ”the answers to the issues raised … will be answered according to section 18 of the Rules and Orders of Council at its next seating due on November 2 2006”.
”As you may know, our council meetings are opened to the public, therefore answers to these issues will be dealt with accordingly at that point,” Mkholo said, declining to comment any further.
Tshwane residents grumble over messy local government
Tshwane residents are losing their faith in the local government’s bureaucratic system, saying that the municipality is a mess and disorganised, reports Hila Bouzaglou.
The credibility of the Tshwane metro council, which is the local municipality for about two million residents, was under the spotlight a few weeks ago when an unlicensed vehicle was used to reconnect a Rietfontein resident’s electricity power.
Henk van Heerden’s electricity was cut in September after he did not receive an electricity bill for 15 months. Although he paid his monthly account, a contractor arrived at his house without warning to cut the power because he was R900 ”in arrears”.
After paying the R900 immediately, it took eight hours for a contractor to return to the house and switch the electricity on, leaving the Van Heerdens without electricity the whole day.
Van Heerden inspected the contractor’s car while they were busy reconnecting the power. The licence disc had expired because the contractor (hired by the Tshwane metro council) ”had outstanding tickets at the Tshwane metro police”.
Like many of the licensing departments in Johannesburg (such as Marlboro and Edenvale), the Centurion licensing centre is, as the DA’s motion stated, chaotic.
Ali Maringa, commander of the Tshwane testing authority, said the Centurion centre sees up to 2 000 people a day, though it only has the capacity to serve 800.
”There’s nothing we can do. They all come to Centurion, and other licensing centres in Waltloo and Akasia are empty. You go in there and it takes 10 minutes; at Centurion you can wait hours.”
People coming to the department for learner’s and driver’s licences as well as those coming for licence renewals have to wait in a single long queue because they go through the same procedures, explains Maringa.
”It takes 10 minutes to deal with one person, and that’s if you’re fast. If you’re slow, it can take 15 minutes. We’re seeing about four people in one hour. If you’re number 100 in the queue, it will take you hours.”
Red tape
Nicholas de Villiers, a lecturer at Varsity College in Tshwane, said he recently waited at the Tshwane’s central licensing department for four hours. ”The thing is that they don’t put you in the right queue and it becomes a bureaucratic mess where the red tape becomes more important than serving the citizens,” he said.
De Villiers’s car was also recently broken into outside his apartment building on Church Street, and he didn’t receive his case number from the central police station in time to claim from insurance.
The roads are also not up to scratch, says Tshwane resident Gareth Coetzee. ”Traffic here is ridiculous because road works take forever,” he said, bringing to mind images of Johannesburg’s notorious Rivonia Road, where cars stay put in traffic for hours.
Coetzee, who works for a community newspaper based in Pretoria, said people in Pretoria are losing hope and faith in the local government. But he added that apart from municipality billing being ”a joke” and the frequent water and electricity cuts, ”Pretoria is still pretty squeaky clean”.
Zelda Potgieter, a resident in the northern suburbs of Tshwane, complained about electricity bills arriving six weeks late and negligence in the way the Tshwane metro operates its service call centre.
”When you phone the Tshwane metro to make a query you are put on hold for hours, or they just don’t pick up the phone. It comes down to you just [not knowing] what’s going on,” she said.
But while poor municipality services and bad roads may be new to people in Tshwane, it’s old news in Johannesburg. De Villiers said that having lived both in Tshwane and Johannesburg, the municipality in Tshwane is not ”nearly as bad as in Johannesburg”.