Durban - THE leadership crisis in eThekwini council has resulted in at least three executive committee (exco) meetings not being held, while various sub-committees have also not held their meetings in the past month, impacting negatively on service delivery.
The community services, municipal public accounts and human settlements committees did not sit, but the security and emergency, governance and economic development committees held their meetings.
IFP councillor Mdu Nkosi said the sub-committees made recommendations and had a “huge” impact in the running of the city.
“Line departments communicate with these committees to understand issues on the ground. If these committees don’t sit, the city is not functioning because there will be no recommendations made to the exco and then to the full council for their endorsement,” he said.
Nkosi added that the municipality would have been placed under administration a long time ago if the province was run by opposition parties.
The municipality’s leadership paralysis resulted after the ANC’s provincial executive demoted all its members who sat in exco, including former mayor Zandile Gumede and her deputy, Fawzia Peer. Transport MEC Mxolisi Kaunda was due to be voted in as the new mayor, but his inauguration was delayed after Gumede rescinded her resignation last week.
Professor Fayth Ruffin, a local governance expert at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said the separation of politics and administration was a long-standing issue worldwide.
“It’s called the politics-administration dichotomy. To get past that, the idea is to establish complementarity between politics and administration in a way that an administration and management can continue, irrespective of the political issues,” she said.
Ruffin said studies showed how the complementarity of politics and administration could be ensured by using African knowledge. “African ways of knowing integrate things for productive outcomes,” she said.