DA boycott special council meeting – adjustment budget couldn’t be approved

The city council couldn’t approve the adjustment budget at the special council meeting yesterday (26 February) because DA councillors refused to attend the meeting. A quorum therefore couldn’t be reached.

“The DA refuses to be a rubber stamp of the corrupt JB Marks administration. We have reached our limits concerning the abuse of our presence in council meetings to rubberstamp poorly drafted, incomplete, and late submitted reports to council”, DA councillor Santi Britz said on Friday.

She says the speaker only schedule special council meetings to finalise specific items on an agenda that needs to be urgently finalised and doesn’t leave room to address other urgent service delivery matters.

She also explains that there is a difference between an ordinary council meeting and a special council meeting. Ordinary council meetings are supposed to be scheduled every month, yet the speaker refuses to do this because he doesn’t want to address formal questions put on the agenda by opposition parties. He removes items of contention from the council agenda protecting his carders from having to be accountable to the council.

“Senior officials, political office bearers and councillors were implicated and are facing criminal charges and have been instrumental in the blatant violation of the municipal bylaws and the applicable land use legislation. They encouraged illegal land invasions under the Speaker’s watch. Not a single person was held accountable and as custodian of the Code of Conduct for Councillors the Speaker has turned a blind eye or tacitly approved such conduct”, Britz says.

She further states that the Municipal Manager and CFO, who are directly accountable to the council, were suspended and that the Speaker did not deem it appropriate to call a council meeting to inform the council of the allegations. He also didn’t deem it appropriate to call a council meeting following the outcomes of an SUI investigation into COVID 19 related fraud/theft/corruption/ financial misconduct. Britz also mentions that whilst the municipality is being abused for political games, JB Marks is faced with unprecedented failures in service delivery:

• A failure to maintain and repair our water and sewerage systems, causing millions of rands to technical losses. It also resulted in the overflow of sewerage systems in residential homes and residential areas and as a result a direct violation of the fundamental right to a healthy environment
• A failure to repair our roads and exposing our residents to damage to property and injury.
• A failure to collect waste and maintaining our waste facilities under the conditions of the statutory approval thereof. In this failure, the fundamental right to a healthy environment for our residents was violated.
• Failing to deliver in the provision of housing and as a substitution thereof allowed councillors to initiate the unlawful and illegal of land by causing the poorest of the poor members of our community to settle on land without any services and without the financial means or any intention to provide any services in the nearby future. This is further aggravated by the existence of other communities, in our municipal area who have been caused to wait for services to their homes for a long as ten years or more.
• A failure to clean parks and living spaces around residential areas. In this respect, our city is probably in the worst state it has ever been.
• A failure to repair street lights and creating an environment where vulnerable members of our community like women and children are unsafe and are exposed to violent attacks.
• A failure to acquire and maintain waste trucks and instead of renting trucks from a private entity for amounts that would have enabled the municipality to replace its whole fleet three times since December 2018.
• Paying and authorising overtime that is way more than what is permitted in terms of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act or the Collective Agreement for municipal workers. Despite, effectively authorising theft, not a single person was held accountable.
• A failure to keep and control source documents to be accountable for the municipality’s finances. This is evident from the Auditor-General’s annual statutory audit.
• A blatant and repeated failure or refusal to implement section 32 of the Local Government: Municipal Finance Management Act, by holding individuals accountable for irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure and unauthorised expenditure since, at the very least, 2010. This expenditure has accumulated to almost R3 billion.