Durban — Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs MEC Bongi Sithole-Moloi has called on the IFP leadership in the province to intervene and condemn the violent behaviour of its members during the council meeting in Nongoma.
The Cogta MEC said the department received videos showing IFP councillors and members entering council chambers with traditional weapons, singing war songs, and threatening residents, municipal officials and media personnel.
She said the acts took place during a sitting scheduled to be chaired by the deputy director-general for local government, Madoda Khathide, after Cogta received a petition signed by 25 of the 39 councillors. The MEC intervened after several attempts to sit the council were allegedly thwarted by the IFP.
She said the acts were regrettable “considering that the Nongoma Local Municipality is also ‘Ihlalankosi’ where the king of the Zulu nation resides. Undue acts of violence in the realm have the potential to muddy the great Zulu kingdom and impact the delivery of services to its residents.
“Cogta calls on IFP members to stop impeding municipal processes and allow the people’s will to prevail. The department also extends the call to senior IFP members to intervene with reason and avoid the eventualities of violent acts in their name,” the MEC said.
The meeting, which was called by opposition parties to conduct a motion of no confidence against the IFP leadership, was scheduled to take place on Monday but was postponed to Tuesday after it was disrupted by people who were seen on video clips walking on the tables half-naked.
The meeting eventually proceeded on Tuesday and the IFP was ousted and lost its first municipality to the new ANC-EFF-NFP coalition. The NFP’s Clifford Ndabandaba was elected as the new mayor, while the EFF’s Sabelo Nkosi took the deputy mayor position. The speaker position went to the ANC’s Babongile Sithole.
Nongoma is the heartland of the IFP and it had vowed to keep it under its control after the EFF formally announced that it had entered into a coalition with the ANC and NFP. The new arrangement was likely to affect at least eight hung municipalities in the province where the EFF had helped the IFP to govern after the 2021 local government elections.
Hitting back, the IFP accused the MEC of abusing her position to influence decisions in favour of the ANC at the cost of service delivery in local government.
In a statement, the party’s provincial chairperson Thami Ntuli said the decision by the MEC to prematurely get involved in the governance of the IFP-run Maphumulo and Nongoma municipalities constituted total overreach.
He said ANC councillors wanted to make political changes in the leadership of Nongoma and Maphumulo municipalities, but they had failed to follow internal processes in petitioning the speakers of the two municipalities to convene special council meetings.
“It is against this background that the IFP in KZN wishes to express its unhappiness with how Sithole-Moloi has chosen to handle the Maphumulo and Nongoma municipality matters. Instead of first conducting an independent investigation of both these municipalities before acting, she opted to only listen to the side of her ANC comrades,” said Ntuli.
Ntuli challenged the MEC to employ the same energy to expedite and resolve the uMkhanyakude District matter, which he said the ANC was occupying unlawfully.
In uMkhanyakude, he said the voters demanded change and voted the ANC out of power, but the elaborate stalling tactics of the ANC were delaying service delivery, as the budget could not be passed.
WhatsApp your views on this story to 071 485 7995
Daily News