The DA in the council has accused officials of the ANC-led metro of hijacking important policies of council and undermining the role of elected public representatives.
Speaking in the budget debate, last week, the DA’s Clr Chris Swanepoel said this was one of the reasons why the DA could not support the ANC’s budget.
He raised serious concerns that the ANC-led metro had forced through the approval of policy amendments by allowing officials free reign on changes.
These amendments, which impact on the spending of public money, happened without proper consultation or oversight over the process.
Swanepoel went on to say the DA did not believe the policy amendments should be passed without further scrutiny.
The proposed policy changes are intended to be a “road map” of how public money would be spent in the metro’s Integrated Development Plan (IDP).
However, too few councillors know what the changes are or what they mean, and the DA has requested that the metro retrospectively present the changes at a workshop, to ensure that every public representative knows what the potential consequences of the changes will be.
“It is a disgrace that officials were able to make changes without input from councillors, who may well have wanted pieces of policy added or scrapped completely,” said Swanepoel.
The DA has demanded that whoever compiled the report take responsibility for the fact that only seven of the 10 oversight committees’ input and comments were recorded.
The Corporate and Shared Services Committee, for example, is not mentioned, which means that not one of the committee’s recommendations on any of the 11 departments it oversees, can be adopted.
In addition, the seven committees which are represented have been heavily edited; only a condensed version of their recommendations appears in the report.
“The question of who was permitted to carry out these edits has to be asked, because no one has the power to edit information coming out of oversight committees and the council cannot pass resolutions based on the scant information provided,” Swanepoel added.
