Analyst says City of Johannesburg will be dysfunctional until 2021 elections
JOHANNESBURG – Service delivery would suffer a huge blow as Council would have a difficulty in passing budgets.
The City of Johannesburg is likely to be dysfunctional and face a service delivery backlog until next year’s local government elections.
This was expressed by political analyst Somadoda Fikeni, following the recent developments at the City after the ANC reclaimed power in December last year.
Shortly after its victory, the ANC and its coalition partners voted for the removal of the speaker of Council Vasco da Gama. However, the motion of no confidence was ruled unsuccessful by the presiding officer on the matter, DA’s Alex Christians who is also a chairperson of chairpersons.
The ANC wrote a letter to MEC for Corporative Governance Lebogang Maile to intervene. Subsequently, a special meeting was called which was shunned by the EFF and the DA where a new speaker, ANC’s Nonceba Molwele, was elected with the presence of two defiant DA councillors, Vinay Choonie and Basil Douglas.
Douglas and Choonie were expelled from the DA in December for defying the party’s instruction not to attend the meeting. A municipal by-election is expected to take place to elect new councillors.
On 23 January, Maile suspended Da Gama for three months without pay for postponing the vote for the new mayor to a week later. Da Gama had postponed the Council meeting to seek legal opinion after councillors debated on what constitutes a majority vote in the council.
The DA responded with an urgent application filed at the High Court on 24 January to have Maile’s decision to suspend Da Gama revoked. Maile cancelled the suspension on 27 January.
“The particular battles between political parties and taking each other to court would render the municipality dysfunctional. Unfortunately, at this point, any intervention would be seen in political terms,” said Fikeni.
With political parties failing to work together, Fikeni said service delivery would suffer a huge blow as Council would have a difficulty in passing budgets. “Without political parties working together, budget passing would be a challenge and services would be interrupted. As is, there’s a backlog and the situation is not helpful.”
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Furthermore, Fikeni said the change in administration will also bring instability in the City. “Usually, the change of administration comes with the removal of some programmes and employees in management positions.
“Lack of stability is a problem which also hits hard on service delivery.”
Fikeni believes that the situation at the City of Johannesburg won’t change until the upcoming local government elections next years. “No political party will benefit from this situation. The EFF might also be blamed for breaking away from the voting agreement they had with the DA resulting in the loss of power over the City.
“For now, there will be behind-the-scene deals and discussions taking place with other smaller parties until the local government elections.”
