Almost 500 City of Mbombela council decisions remain unfulfilled

The FF Plus plans to request the City of Mbombela (CoM) to implement 496 outstanding council decisions taken several years ago, at its next council sitting.

The party also said the renewal of intergovernmental lease contracts creates more debt for the municipality that is already severely cash-strapped.

According to Cllr Ken Robertson of the FF Plus, the party wants the mayor, Sibongile Makushe-Mazibuko, the municipal manager, Wiseman Khumalo, and the departments accountable for failing to implement these council decisions since 2016, to address them at once.

“If they do not address these matters immediately, the FF Plus will demand that disciplinary steps be taken against all of them. The list compiled by the municipality shows unexecuted council decisions by the Department of City Planning and Development (93), the Department of Financial Management (86), the Council Office (63) and the Department of Technical Services,” he said.

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Robertson said these include, among others, overtime payments to municipal workers amounting to about R14m per month.
“Overtime payments must be stopped, and privately owned vacant lots must be maintained by the relevant owners, and in the event of this not being done, the municipality should fine such owners. The municipality’s highly irregular and fruitless expenditure, amounting to approximately R50m, must urgently be investigated,” Robertson stressed.

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He also said decisions made by the council are meant to benefit the residents and must, therefore, be executed as soon as possible.
“It is unthinkable that hundreds of critical decisions at this level have been dragging on for so long.”

Regarding the issue of municipal debt, the FF Plus opposed the renewal of CoM’s lease contracts with provincial and national government departments. “A summary sent to us in May 2022 indicated that the outstanding debts of provincial and national government departments amounted to R136.3m. And eight months later, that debt has grown to R184m, a spike of R47.7m. R5.9m is owed to CoM every month,” he said.

Robertson also said those payments would have helped the cash-strapped municipality to provide better services to residents or even to repay its debt to Eskom. “If the municipality had heeded the FF Plus’s advice to first collect its debts before signing new intergovernmental lease contracts, it would not have found itself in such a dire financial crisis,” he said.

CoM’s spokesperson, Joseph Ngala, was unavailable for a comment by the time of this being posted.