NELSPRUIT – Mbombela Municipality says its systems are not flawed; instead, the failure of its oversight committees is an issue of reprioritising. This is according to Mr Joseph Ngala, spokesman for the municipality.
In the meantime, the opposition in council says it has become increasingly worried about these supervision groups. The Section 79 committees are supposed to oversee the spending of different committees, but some still have not seen the first quarter spending. Mr Jo Koster, the DA caucus leader in the municipality, said he was very concerned about council’s present ability to function.
He said councillors failed to form a quorum at a local economic development (LED) oversight committee meeting last week. According to him, only four DA and two ANC members attended the LED gathering, while a minimum of eight were required to be present.
He said it was the latest in a series of supervision committee meetings which he was aware of where insufficient councillors showed up to form a quorum.
These included the gathering on public accounts and finance. In addition, the general managers and members of the mayoral committee failed to show up to the technical and environmental affairs committees despite the members forming a quorum. “Council is at a standstill,” said Koster. “We are not functioning any longer.”
Ngala admitted that the members of the mayoral committees and general managers, who attend the meetings in order to answer for the actions taken by their groups, were sometimes not present, but claimed there were legitimate reasons. “It should be taken into cognisance that the mentioned incumbents had lawful and genuine reasons to be absent and official apologies were tendered and accepted by the committees,” he said.
As for councillors not forming a quorum, he said it was due to clashes in meetings whereby a councillor was erroneously committed to more than one meeting in a day, councillors being assigned to impromptu or urgent engagements and official apologies. “This is not a unique characteristic to Mbombela, but a part of committee meeting dynamics,” said Ngala. “The Section 79 committees are functional and meetings are postponed on genuine and critical grounds, but this cannot be viewed as an indicator for a flawed system but an issue of reprioritising.”
