Instead of being held accountable for the damage to the Merafong City Local Municipality during her term, the former mayor, Ms Maphefo Mogale-Letsie, now operating under a new name, was rewarded with a senior position last week.
On 7 September, the municipal council gathered virtually for an urgent council meeting. There, the speaker, Mr Elvis Mphithikezi, surprised many when he read the resignation letter of the former mayor.
Later that day, the ANC’s Gauteng provincial legislature’s caucus shared several photos of Mogale-Letsie being sworn in at the provincial legislature.
Although she was sworn in under the name of the “Honourable Sara Madinge Letsie”, the photos clearly show that this person is indeed our former mayor.
While the council meeting announcing her resignation started at midday, the ANC’s post revealed that she had already been sworn in by the Gauteng Provincial Legislature’s speaker, Ntombi Mekgwe, by 14:47.
A DA MPL, Michael Mzamani Shackleton, who first shared the news of Letsie’s new position, noted that the former mayor was thus “rewarded with deployment to the Gauteng legislature, while residents continue to suffer as a result of the mismanagement of the municipality.”
Letsie was removed as Merafong’s mayor on 31 March this year after the Gauteng ANC asked her and the former West Rand District mayor, then MP Boyce Maneli, to step down from their roles for failing to act against officials involved in the col- lapse of VBS Mutual Bank. Both appealed the decision almost immediately, however.
Later, on television, Letsie vigorously defended Merafong’s decision to invest R50 million with the struggling VBS Mutual Bank in June 2017.
During a Cogta (Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs) portfolio committee meeting on 4 December 2019, it emerged that the money transferred to VBS Bank had been ring-fenced for projects and did not come from operational funds. Some of the money was taken from unspent funds from the call account.
“This wrong investment will impact on the cash flow of future projects,” the committee found. A Deloitte forensic report also found the investment in VBS Bank unlawful, as it contravened Treasury regulations under the Municipal Financial Management Act (MFMA). The regulations do not allow municipalities to make deposits with institutions that are not registered as banks, which includes mutual banks like VBS.
Besides the VBS Mutal Bank scandal, many residents blame Letsie, who was in office between 2011 and 2021, for the state of decay in which the municipality fell during that time. The municipality was still in relatively good financial standing before her term. However, among other things, it owed Eskom and Rand Water millions by the time she left.
