Durban - THE ANC’s internal factionalism was having a crippling effect on the smooth running of the eThekwini municipality, including a lack of consequence management. So said opposition parties after a damning report was released by the provincial Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Department (Cogta) .
The report says eThekwini’s six intergovernmental relations clusters are not meeting their objectives because they are also factionalised politically.
The state of local government report on eThekwini, which the Daily News has seen, was presented to councillors and officials last week.
It states that ANC caucuses were not meeting in preparation for meetings and highlights the “high number” of court cases instituted by and against the municipality.
“Litigation is costly. It is not clear how much the municipality is spending on litigation and whether such litigation could have been avoided,” the report reads. “Three-hundred-and-twenty instances of fraud and corruption were reported in the municipality since July 2018, with 179 disciplinary matters instituted during the same period, with 42 dismissals. The department of Cogta will monitor the outcome of the forensic investigations in the metro.”The intergovernmental clusters represent every unit in the municipality to enable oversight by councillors.
The report notes the “poor quality” of decisions taken at cluster meetings because of a lack of preparation.
The assessment was undertaken at all 54 municipalities in the province, focusing on 2018 and 2019.
Cogta spokesperson Lennox Mabaso said MEC Sipho Hlomuka would comment broadly on the matter during his local government budget speech next week.
The DA in eThekwini said there had been “unprecedented” levels of decline in providing basic services in the city since 2016, when the new ANC council leadership under Mayor Zandile Gumede took office.
“Internal factional battles have a crippling effect on the smooth running of the city. At the executive committee level, we have seen ANC councillors disagreeing with each other, leading to important items being deferred because different ANC factions couldn’t agree,” DA chief whip Thabani Mthethwa said.
He said a lack of consequence management had led to the huge number of fraud cases referred to in the report.
“We have been requesting that these reports be made available to councillors. It seems these reports are not tabled because certain councillors are implicated in wrongdoing themselves,” he said.
The IFP said the dissolution of the finance committee in 2016 was the cornerstone of corruption in the city.
Caucus chairperson Prem Iyir said this was the committee that interrogated council spending.
“The council is now suffocated by factionalism since Gumede’s suspension. In the last council meeting in June, there were 65 apologies submitted for not attending. The groundwork was set to make the municipality ungovernable. There are no intergovernmental relations meetings and this, indeed, saw the cancellation of a number of committee meetings,” Iyir said.
He said the numbers reported by Cogta on corruption and litigation were “a drop in the ocean”.
The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse said branches of government should be able to rely on one another.
Acting mayor Fawzia Peer and ANC chief whip Nelly Nyanisa could not be reached for comment.