Durban - The DA, which has entered into a coalition agreement with the IFP and EFF in the City of uMhlathuze, says that it has inherited a broken city, rife with lack of service delivery issues, from the ANC.
Despite the ANC winning a bigger percentage of the votes in the City of uMhlathuze Municipality, in the KwaZulu-Natal north coast, it is the IFP that has emerged with the key mayoral and speaker positions in that council.
Following the local government elections on 1 November, the ANC accumulated 39.5% of the votes and 27 seats to the IFP’s 34.6%, which saw them getting 23 seats. However, following the inaugural sitting of the council, the DA, which had amassed 11.7% of the votes and eight seats and the EFF, which had 9.1% of the votes and six seats, entered into a coalition with the IFP.
The coalition saw the trio of parties manage to usurp the ANC in uMhlathuze and install the IFP’s Dr Nkonzoyakhe Donda unopposed as mayor, while the EFF’s Nkululeko Ngubane has taken the role of Deputy Mayor with the Speaker’s position going to the IFP’s Tobias Gumede.
In the previous administration following the 2016 local government elections, under former mayor Mduduzi Mhlongo of the ANC, the ANC had a whopping 63.7% percent of the votes and 43 seats while the IFP was the opposition with 18.8% of the votes and 13 seats with the DA had 11.5% of the votes with eight seats.
The DA’s Christo Botha, a member of the executive council in the City of uMhlathuze, said that they were inheriting a broken city in which they had to endure potholes and lack of functioning street lights on the roads and lack of water in areas such as Esikhaleni.
“We have endless problems with our electricity grid. The first and foremost thing for us is to get all those service delivery issues sorted out. We need to get the potholes fixed, the street lights working. We need to get the water in Esikhaleni going.
“We need to make sure that sewer pumps are well protected and working so that we don’t have sewerage flowing through our houses and down the street. That is a broken city, and what we inherited, so we’re going to fix that,” Botha said.
He also said that they would ensure strict and proper oversight of municipal spending so that they could account not only to the auditor general but to the residents of uMhlathuze.