Oppositions parties walk out of City of Mbombela council meeting
Several opposition parties in City of Mbombela Council accused the ANC of agreeing to parts of 496 resolutions that had allegedly not been implemented yet.
The City of Mbombela’s (CoM) held a special council meeting at the municipal chambers today, February 28, in which a resolution report was made.
Several of the ANC’s opposition parties accused the ruling party of pushing through some of 496 resolutions, many of them as old as five years, and implying that these resolutions had indeed been implemented, when many of them were allegedly not. The opposition parties also accused the acting speaker, Morris Mazibane, of not recognising them and compromising the integrity of the council. These parties got up and left the chambers in protest against the resolution report.
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The DA’s councillor, Sanley van der Merwe, said some of these resolutions or projects had already been concluded, and should therefore be removed from the resolutions. “Most of the other resolutions were not even done, but they expected us to agree on it, while we know that some of them still need to be investigated. There are also people who were supposed to face disciplinary hearings as a result of some irregularities,” she said.
She also said Mazibane did not comply with the rules of the council or how these were to be handled. “He did not recognise the standing order that compromised the integrity of the council. Our chief whip, Cyril Chuene, will be writing to the MEC of the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Mandla Msibi, to nullify the meeting and the report. We were not given a fair chance to deliberate on it,” she said.
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The FF Plus’s councillor, Ken Robertson, said they would not sit back and watch the ANC use its numbers to push through a portion of the 496 unimplemented resolutions. “They claim they have now been implemented, bringing council resolutions that had been outstanding since 2016 to fruition,” he said.
The other opposition parties were unavailable for comment.
The EFF was not represented at the meeting, but the following parties, the FF Plus, the DA, the ACDP and the ATM, all walked out of the meeting.
The CoM’s spokesperson, Joseph Ngala, was unavailable for comment by the time of posting. When he does, however, this comment will be added.
This is a developing story. Lowvelder will update its readers once more information becomes available.
