Parliament - Parliament's portfolio committee on cooperative governance on Friday accused officials at the Mogalakwena Local Municipality in Limpopo of sabotaging the work of MPs.
The committee visited various municipalities in the Limpopo province this week in a bid to assess the level of service delivery.
Municipal officials and politicians were meant to arrange meetings with local ward councillors, civic organisations and ratepayers' associations. The committee said very few people were invited to the stakeholder engagement at Mogalakwena.
“In all municipalities that the stakeholder interactions where scheduled, the meetings went ahead without a glitch. It was only in Mogalakwena that there was clear sabotage of the stakeholder engagement," said committee chairwoman Faith Muthambi.
"This has robbed the committee of the opportunity to interact with communities they represent and is a direct attack to the constitutional imperative of public participation. Furthermore, Parliament’s rules compel the National Assembly to facilitate public involvement in the legislative and other processes of the assembly and its committees."
Muthambi said she believed the municipality deliberately prevented the committee from engaging with the community "because people are trying to hide the impact of the malfeasance happening within that municipality".
The Mogalakwena municipality received negative audit opinions over the past five years, with unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure totaling over R2.8 billion.