District Municipality in ICU

The Amajuba District Municipality has been classified as a Category C municipality.

This, for those who do not realise it, is the lowest ranking a municipality can receive. This ranking directly correlates to a municipality’s display of instability, fraud, corruption and times its committees meet.

According to a report tabled at a presidential summit on September 18, 2014, the municipality was ranked among the worst performing municipalities in the country.

Democratic Alliance Public Relations Councillor and party whip, Steve Harber, labelled the current state of the municipality as ‘pitiful’.

He listed the issues associated with the municipality as a: “Collapse in service delivery, outages, asset theft, poor maintenance, incompetent managers, many vacancies, and delegations. Chronic underspending, high debtors, no accountability, disclaimers. Community dissatisfaction, and a high number of community protests.”

He believed the Auditor General’s report of the municipality had been equally, if not more scathing and further detailed, than the aforementioned report.

Furthermore, Cllr Harber believed the ‘pitiful state of finances’, coupled with a ‘stagnation in leadership’ are reasons for the deterioration of services and functions as cited by the AG.

He said the DA approached the Department of Co-operative government and traditional affairs (CoGTA) for further insight and clarity in the proposed direction of the municipality on September 9, 2014.

However, “CoGTA was tongueless. This silence meant one of two things: They either didn’t know what to say or all of the above is correct. It is well known that ‘Silence is acquiescence’ in law…”

During a council meeting on February 16, these issues of the municipality were tabled.

District Mayor, Jabu Khumalo said: “I have reported these matters to council before. We must heed the back to basics approach of CoGTA.”

However, Cllr Khumalo’s interpretation of the back to basics call was not entirely aligned to that of CoGTA’s.

This may be because many district councillors did not attend a special strategic mission held on February 2 at Cedara.

The resolutions taken at this meeting stated municipalities would have to adopt a support plan by Friday, February 6. The compliance with the timeline and resolutions from the municipality has been called into focus, and is allegedly at best questionable.

During last week’s council meeting, many councillors found it to be a fitting time to argue among themselves about who was to blame regarding the current state of the municipality.

Eventually, acting speaker of the council, Nkosinathi Zwane, said the council would adopt the CoGTA call.

“From the mayor’s opening statement one thing is clear. We are in the red. We can argue about the reasons, but it doesn’t change the fact that we are in the red. We have been identified as being in I.C.U. We need to agree on how to get out and resolve the problem. We can’t continue blaming the previous administrations and argue here.”