Pretoria – The EFF in Tshwane has called for local government MEC Lebogang Maile to fire the metro's head administrator Mpho Nawa for poor service delivery which the party believed was the cause for the growing number of community protests.
Nawa was appointed in March by Maile as part of a 10-member team of administrators to replace council, which was disbanded by the provincial executive for being dysfunctional.
EFF regional chairperson Moafrika Mabogwana expressed concern about the growing number of service delivery protests since the city was placed under administration.
He said the ongoing unrest in the city was as a result of electricity and water cut-offs, failure to collect waste and Covid-19 corruption within the supply chain management on the appointment and payment of service providers.
According to him, the service delivery problems were "a clear indication that the ANC-appointed administrator Mr Mpho Nawa has failed to achieve the objective set out by the MEC of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) Lebogang Maile when they placed the City under administration".
Mabogwana said residents couldn’t point to any significant improvement in service delivery made by the administrators since they assumed office.
"The lives of the ordinary people of Tshwane have been made increasingly harder by the administrators when they approved higher tariff increases on water and electricity without community inputs, residents are hit with the excessively high municipal bills largely because of tariff increases and the billing mistakes of the City which the administrator has failed to fix even now,"he said.
Mabogwana also cited the fact that a clinic built for the people of Hammanskraal has not been opened because the administrators failed to ensure it had water and electricity.
"We call on the MEC for Cogta to remove the incompetent and utterly useless administrator Mr Mpho Nawa and replace him with a more competent person who will be able to resolve the crisis of service delivery in Tshwane before the City is plunged in to an even dire state of affairs than what it was under the DA administration," he said.
Maile's spokesperson Castro Ngobese hit back at the EFF, saying he found the comment to be "unfortunate and unhelpful".
"What we have seen as the department is that since the administrators took over the affairs of the municipality we have seen significant progress in terms of service delivery provision in the city," he said.
Ngobese appealed to the EFF and other political parties not to use Tshwane as a political football.
He said the department was interested in maintaining stability in the city and ensuring service delivery to communities.
"At the right time when parties are given an opportunity to campaign so that they can be in charge of the city they can make such statements. For now these statements are not helpful. They are not assisting and they are not in the best interest of the residents of Tshwane, who have suffered poor service delivery before as a result of a coalition between the EFF and the DA," Ngobese said.
Pretoria News