Pretoria - Placing the Tshwane Municipality under administration is an illegal action by the ANC and an attempt to get back power through illegal means, says the DA.
The DA said the ANC has for years been losing political support across various municipalities and that its treatment of the debacle in Tshwane was proof it was unable to handle electoral defeat.
These comments follow Gauteng Premier David Makhura’s announcement that the Tshwane Municipality would be placed under administration and that its council will be dissolved.
Makhura said the Gauteng executive council met on Wednesday and discussed its pressing concerns with how the city was being run and its affect on residents.
The city had no mayor and no city manager.
After deliberation, the executive council decided to invoke section 139 (1) (c) of the Constitution. This means that an administrator will be appointed to oversee the management of municipality and that by-elections should be held within 90 days.
Makhura said the decision was motivated by a string of concerns which the provincial government had been pressuring the Tshwane Municipality to resolve.
Some of these concerns include issues with procurement and how tenders are awarded; unauthorised fruitless and wasteful expenditure flagged by the auditor-general; failure to spend conditional grants; constant appointments of senior managers; and a failure to elect ward committees.
Mike Moriarty, the DA’s Gauteng provincial chairperson, said all these claims made by Makhura were not true. He said Tshwane’s council had communicated to the province on various issues raised by Co-operative Governance and Traditional MEC Lebogang Maile.
“We cannot allow the ANC to use untruths, half-truths and outright subversion to undo democratic decisions. Because if we fail now, the consequences for municipalities around the country after the 2021 local government elections will be dire,” Moriarty said on Thursday.
“There was no engagement between the provincial government and the City of Tshwane, except for the notification where the provincial government expressed the intent to place the City under administration.”
Moriarty said all the service delivery concerns which had been raised by the province had been addressed.
These include signing of a contract to address water concerns in Hammanskraal; senior managers who were suspended from the service delivery cluster had been reappointed; and the city was following the National Treasury guidelines to deal with underspending and extension of grants.
The DA had previously threatened legal action if the provincial government placed Tshwane under administration. Moriarty said the party was seeking legal advice on the matter.