• Anonymous writes:
Elections are done and dusted and the coalition council salvo has been fired in the municipality.
Clearly the casualties of such political arrangements within council are me and you, the residents. We can only hope for the best.
Like many other hung municipalities, no party in our council got an outright majority, which means the DA with the most votes will have to find a coalition partner to govern. A coalition government poses a challenge though.
We have seen in the past with a former speaker pulling to pieces politically driven arrangements by other parties.
From that time, people of this city understood coalition arrangement as unstable and parties don’t cooperate, which at some point hampered service delivery. To put it simply for a layman, in the past our municipality has been paralysed because of deadlocks in the council that made it difficult for the council to pass decisions and adopt budgets. The inability of the council to make these important decisions often adversely affected the delivery of services to communities. The ANC is no angel to this mess.
We all know that cooperation in council requires that coalition partners attend, and remain in council meetings, and support the motions of the coalition partners. Their cooperation is necessary to establish a quorum required to take valid decisions or pass motions that require an ordinary or supporting majority vote as envisaged in the Municipal Structures Act.
Often the instability in the council is a symptom of an underlying issue in the coalition government: the inability or unwillingness of coalition partners to work together.
This time around, Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)’s Juju publicly divorced his party from the DA which means it is unlikely that the two parties could share the same bed. When you look into the benches of the ANC, its councillors appear irritated and not in the mood to support a promotion of the DA government for the 2024 national elections.
In the past, the unbridled egos of our local party leaders and truculent traits were constantly on parade. This is unlikely to change and might affect whichever arrangement that will see the light of day.
Negotiating coalition government in our municipality is not a straightforward process. The youthful mayor should be forward-looking and must anticipate the possible issues of conflict that may hinder the parties from cooperating during the life cycle of the coalition government. The young man wields significant bargaining power to ensure there is service delivery in the city.
However, since the mayor emerged fortuitously through a throwing of dice by the EFF and smaller parties, the outcome of coalition agreement to govern our city is a hodgepodge of the good, the bad, and the ugly. But as a resident of this city, allow me to join many in support of our new mayor.
Good luck, Mr Mayor!
