It has come to light that the newly appointed acting Municipal Manager of Mogale City, Lesley Mahuma, has been booked “off sick” and chaos is currently the order of the day at Mogale’s municipal offices.
Information given to the News from a very reliable source within the municipality states that Mahuma has been threatened by ANC members, resulting in him taking an undisclosed amount of time off during this crucial period.
Mahuma was appointed during a special meeting last Friday, 13 January. A new Speaker and a new Chief Whip were also appointed. The appointment came about as a result of the previous Speaker, Patric Lipudi, jeopardising the functioning of the council by refusing to call meetings as requested by the majority of councillors as well as by the Executive Mayor.
Furthermore, the ANC West Rand released a statement to the News stating that their people continue to experience an atmosphere of “horrible rule of lawlessness at the hands of the desperate coalition led Mogale City Local Municipality”.
The statement continues: “The clueless Mayor at the helm of this once-thriving municipality went on with his illegal council meeting on 13 January in the company of his stooges as usual, and they declared a motion of no confidence in the Speaker and the Chief Whip respectively, in the absence of the IEC and worst of all defying rules of council and relevant legislation, elected themselves into those positions and nominated an acting accounting officer.”
It also says that there “is an urgent need for governance stability and commitment to focus on serious developmental challenges facing the people of Mogale, it cannot be business as usual that the council is always turned into a circus at the expense of tax payers”.
“We will show the coalition that our two decades-old experience in government and the fact that the people of Mogale City gave us a mandate to lead 28 of the 38 wards of Mogale City will not go to waste. We will exercise our rights as the party that governs the country, province and district. The coalition has themselves to blame for what is coming because we will not stand idle as this once-thriving municipality is turned into a shambles.”
For now, tensions within the council remain high, and the Gauteng MEC for Cooperative Governance, Paul Mashatile, has taken note of the current state of affairs at Mogale City. According to a daily newspaper report, Mashatile is “very worried”.
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