Win-win for Merafong and union over MM’s appointment

The longstanding legal battle between Samwu and the Merafong municipality over the appointment of Mr Nhlanhla Maxwell Mabaso as Merafong’s municipal manager may, at last, be drawing to a close. Samwu (the South African Municipal Workers’ Union) obtained an intedict in the Labour Court on 30 April 2012, preventing the Merafong City Local Municipality from appointing Mabaso as Merafong’s new municipal Manager (MM). Mabaso’s appointment was done despite the fact that the municipality where he had previously worked, the Sisonke district municipality in rural KwaZulu-Natal, had in 2011 irregular expenditure amounting to R351,9 million and unauthorized expenditure amounting to R65,1 million, as listed in a report by the Auditor-general. During the previous year, the AG noted that there was unauthorised expenditure amounting to R9,172 million, fruitless and wasteful expenditure amounting to R1 594 million and irregular expenditure amounting to R5,725 million at Sisonke. After both parties continued to fight the matter in court, the matter was heard in the Labour Appeals Court on 22 September. Judgement was delivered on 20 April this year. Judge Philip Coppin ruled that the Labour Court should not have entertained the matter because the intervention of the Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs had not been sought first and the Minister did not join in the proceedings before the Labour Court. Instead, Samwu prematurely took the matter to the Labour Court when it did not get assistance from the MEC. It is now up to the relevant minister, currently, Mr Des van Rooyen, to take the necessary steps to sort out the matter. Although he did not make a definitive finding in this regard, Poppin noted that the municipality’s failure to mention the AG’s reports in Mabaso’s interview or give him an opportunity to respond to them may have influenced the outcome of the appointment process. He ruled that the appeal against the Labour Court sentence is upheld and that the application to have Mabaso’s appointment set aside is dismissed. Both Samwu and the municipality have to pay their own legal costs. Interstingly, one of the judges hearing the case, Judge Tati Makgoka, prepared a separate dissenting judgment in which he expressed the view that the appeal should have been upheld.