Johannesburg - The war of words between the ANC and the country’s biggest municipal workers’ union looks set to intensify as government gets serious about clamping down on poor-performing municipalities.
The SA Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) and North West Premier Supra Mahumapelo’s spat over allegations that water in Mafikeng had been “poisoned” continued this week amid fierce protest from municipal workers.
Samwu alleges that Mahumapelo told Mafikeng residents to beware of local water because it “had been poisoned by municipal workers”.
North West local government spokesman, Ben Bole, denies the premier made the comments, but said there had indeed been rumours that Mafikeng water was not safe to drink.
But similar battles are likely to be mirrored across the country.
The largest voter mobilisation ever for unscheduled elections in South Africa takes place this weekend in preparation for 132 by-elections.
These include a by-election in the Ngako Modiri Municipality, which encompasses Mafikeng, Zeerust, Lichtenburg and Sannieshof, where the ANC dissolved its own council for poor performance.
Two ANC-run councils in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal have also been dissolved, a mechanism that requires concurrence from the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) through Section 139 1(c) of the Constitution .
The IEC says the clause, which empowers a provincial government to dissolve a municipality that has failed in its obligations, is a “last resort” that has rarely been used in democratic South Africa post 1994.
The two are Inkwanca local municipality in the Eastern Cape and Mooi Mpofana local municipality in KZN.
The demarcation of poor-performing municipalities is also on the cards, as the Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Department (Cogta) gears up for a tough local government election in 2016.
For years government has mulled the problem of too many local municipalities without the capacity to deliver.
This week Cogta Minister Pravin Gordhan again referred to weak, financially unviable municipalities, while others struggled to attract “the right level of capacity”, for example municipal managers.
Local municipalities, with small a population of councillors with limited or non-existent revenue, were entirely dependent on transfers from national government, in some instances.
The statements were made after this week’s Presidential Coordinating Committee (PCC) committee, a follow-up to last month’s Presidential Local Government Summit which brought together mayors and municipal managers from South Africa’s 278 municipalities.
With the demarcation of municipalities; acquisition of land for the development; municipal budgets and expenditure, and issues of municipal procurement reforms on the agenda, it would seem Ngako Modiri, Inkwanca and Mooi Mpofana would have been top of mind.
Samwu, on the other hand, has been the site of serious corruption allegations itself with its own members alleging at least R156 million is missing from union coffers.
“Samwu wants to cause confusion. They deliberately miscommunicate this issue for their own interests,” Bole says of the fracas in the North West.
But with the union’s fast diminishing ability to claim the moral high ground, political point-scoring across the country over municipal non-delivery will surely increase.
Political Bureau