Opposition parties walked out of the council meeting at the City of Mbombela’s (CoM) chambers on February 29. The special meeting was held so that the CoM’s mayor could present the municipality’s adjusted budget for 2024.

The FF Plus councillor, Ken Robertson, said “We feel the “speaker is in violation of Section 160 (8) of the South African Constitution and does not act in good faith of the below-mentioned constitutional requirement that members of a municipal council are entitled to participate in its proceedings and those of its committees in a manner that (a) allows parties and interests reflected within the council to be fairly represented; (b) is consistent with democracy; and (c) may be regulated by national legislation.”

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He added that the rules and standing orders allow councillors 48 hours to receive agendas and study them enough to warrant an educated opinion of important matters. “In this case, we also learnt 10 minutes before the council meeting that important items on the agenda had suddenly been retracted and were not going to be discussed. We were not afforded the opportunity to request why these recommendations were suddenly retracted, because our debate on these matters was shut down by the speaker. This is unacceptable and we will challenge the validity of this meeting in the provincial government arena.”

Meawhile, the DA’s chief whip, Cyril Chuene, said the meeting was illegal, because the councillors had not receive the agenda on time. He said some of the recommendations were removed from the agenda without the speaker informing them. “We are going to write to the MEC for co-operative governance and traditional affairs, Mandla Msibi, to nullify the council meeting. The speaker did not follow the rules of the council,” he said.

The EFF and ACDP also left the council meeting on the same sentiments.

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CoM’s speaker, William Nkatha, said what the councillors did was uncalled for, because there are rules that legislate the municipality council meeting, and insisted that the council had followed those. However, even if the opposition were not happy about certain things or did not agree with them, they were not supposed to walk out of the meeting. “They have raised their matter, and I responded to them. I have asked them to find a way to do what is right, and they decided to go. So we were not going to force them to stay if they had made up their minds that they wanted to leave.”

This is a developing matter. Any pertinent developments will be published at a later stage, either in print in Lowvelder or on its website.