By Chantelle Fourie
After much debate and technicalities, the City of Johannesburg’s 2019/20 budget has finally been approved, despite the African National Congress’ (ANC) absence.
This is because council only needs 136 councillors to reach a quorum, the minimum number of councillors necessary to conduct council business, and even after the ANC left there were 137 members present.
The ANC decided to leave council halfway through the sitting. Speaker of Council, Cllr Vasco Da Gama then decided to retable the budget items once again.
Spokesperson Jolidee Matongo said the ANC believed the budget was not representative of residents’ wishes expressed in the Integrated Development Plan (IDP).
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“Passing a budget that does not reflect the wishes of people is quite unfortunate.
“It is clear that the DA will only listen to the EFF. We have made a number of inputs, like the reintroduction of 6kl of free water for all residents, but those were not taken into account.”
The party also rejected the 2017/18 budget, which was the first budget presented by the coalition government since the 2016 municipal elections.
The operational and capital budgets and the IDP for the 2018/19 financial year were passed, as a whole, as the budget.
Executive mayor Cllr Herman Mashaba said this is the budget that will begin a large-scale turnaround of Johannesburg.
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The budget was finally passed after the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) rejected the initial water and electricity tariff increases.
The party later recommended changes to be made before accepting the increases.
The water and sanitation tariff will thus now increase by 7.17 per cent instead of the original increase of 7.37 per cent. The proposed increase for the electricity tariff was lowered to 13.2 per cent instead of the original increase of 14.2 per cent.
