Shedding light on responsibilities and removal of ward councillors
Grant Masterson of Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (EISA) shares on all to know about the removal of councillors.
Ward councillors or part-time councillors are elected representatives who are elected to improve the local community in which they serve.
According to the South African Local Government Association, councillors are expected to play a political role in representing residents and other stakeholders by providing a linkage between the council and the community.
The Alberton Record has since investigated issues around residents removing a ward councillor should they not be happy with that councillor.
Grant Masterson, head of programmes governance, said it is difficult to remove a councillor. He said this would cause instability.
“Once elected, councillors are pretty much in office the whole time and it is difficult to remove them unless they choose to resign or die or are convicted of a criminal offence. If you have councillors that can simply be removed all the time by citizens, then I don’t know if we would get any work done,” he explained.
He said this would cause chaos in the running of the council themselves, ‘which is not good’.
On the other hand, one can be removed from their position as a full-time councillor but would remain in the council as a normal councillor.
“What we’ve seen in Ekurhuleni, in Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Bay recently, those are the removal of persons from full-time councillor positions. But those members do not lose their councillorship. There is nothing that compels that councillor to resign, once the IEC has declared them elected. The only thing that removes them from the council is the calling of new elections,” he said.
According to Masterson, there is not much that residents can do once they have elected a councillor, except to vote more carefully next time.
He reiterated that it is important for councillors to run the fixed term, which expires after five years.
“For instance, if a councillor comes in and within two months there are issues of corruption, then residents have to avoid re-electing such a person their term.
As far as citizens are concerned, removing bad councillors is difficult. However, if a councillor is corrupt and there’s evidence, that’s the type of criminal offence that could see them removed as councillors,” Masterson said.
