Endumeni’s new Mayor, Mcebo Mkhize of the IFP, was inaugurated Tuesday following a Council meeting.
There were two nominations: Mkhize and the ANC’s Cllr Zita Shelembe with the IFP and DA voting together to make it 7-6 in favour of Mkhize.
The five ANC Councillors and a single ABC candidate voted in favour of Shelembe.
Mkize takes the chain of office as intrigue and turmoil continue to swirl around Endumeni Municipality. Last Thursday, following the resignation of Siyabonga Ndlovu, a bomb scare scuppered a council meeting that would have elected the new mayor.

This chaos follows the local sheriff’s attachment of 13 vehicles after the municipality failed to obey a court order to pay dismissed official Zakhele Zulu over R9,000,000. Zulu, the previous corporate services manager, was fired for alleged misconduct.
In October, he won his appeal against his dismissal – with the commissioner, P van Zyl, finding the case to be procedurally flawed. He awarded Zulu 11 months’ salary, with a payment deadline of October 30, which the municipality failed to meet.

Zulu took further legal action, resulting in the sheriff attaching 13 municipal vehicles, including refuse trucks and fire engines. It is not yet clear if the municipality has since settled the payout. Another official who was dismissed along similar lines has also brought his case to the Bargaining Council and he too is expected to receive a payout. As the storm clouds gathered over the municipal building, known colloquially as the Kremlin, a leaked letter by former Mayor Ndlovu to his IFP head office poured more fuel on the fire. In the letter, Ndlovu bemoans the DA calling him incompetent ‘even though the municipality has poured millions into various upliftment projects in the DA’s Ward 7’ over the past three years.

He wrote that he did everything he could to maintain a smooth relationship with the DA, which saw hundreds of thousands of rands ‘given to them’ for upgrading, but ‘their demands are endless’. He claims he listened to them to reinstate the Munsoft financial system after the previous system caused chaos and this resulted in litigation by the company previously used.

Furthermore, there was the hiring of VIP protection, which he said also put the municipality ‘under litigation’. He went on to say that the municipality no longer has money (to give them). The letter exposes the party’s ‘deployment policy’, where party-aligned candidates are identified rather than selected from a thorough hiring process.

Commenting on the letter the ANC’s Lucky Khumalo, regional secretary, said ‘we are at all surprised as the DA’s posture within Endumeni Council had always boggled our minds, when time and again the DA would vote to defend the Mayor whom they recently accused of incompetence’.

“It is clear that the only reason they’ve now dumped him is because the Municipal coffers have run dry and, he is no longer able to “maintain the working relationship between the IFP and the DA” with the cash which he had been pampering with, siphoned from the coffers of the already financially crippled institution. This proves beyond doubt that, the IFP/DA coalition is sustained solely to enrich individual councillors.”

DA says it is a smear campaign

Cllr Gopie said the ANC was conducting a smear campaign and that no DA Councillor in Endumeni had ever taken or demanded money from the Mayor or anyone else but had rather agitated firmly for service delivery which was being happened by the chronic Eskom debt and outstanding rates and taxes. He called on the ANC and the former Mayor to provide concrete proof of any misdoings by DA Councillors so that these can be thoroughly investigated. “There is no such thing … it’s just an attempt to smear our good names.”

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