Cope mayor rejects DA’s rebuff, pledges to save Tshwane from financial ruin

Unfazed at being branded ‘a Judas’ by the Democratic Alliance (DA) caucus, newly elected City of Tshwane mayor Dr Murunwa Makwarela this week vowed to strengthen a working relationship with coalition partners to rescue the cash-strapped municipality and deliver services.

Cope mayor in Tswhane

Makwarela, whose election victory has sparked a witch-hunt among the ranks of the DA and ActionSA councillors who voted against the coalition mandate – has promised to assemble an ANC-Economic Freedom Fighters multiparty mayoral committee “which is fit for purpose”.

While the Congress of the People (Cope) only had one seat in Tshwane, Makwarela refuted the perception the party would be bulldozed in decision-making, maintaining:

“We are not small at all, but a constitutional organisation that plays by the rules and is incorruptible.”

Tshwane’s irregular expenditure

The damning auditor-general (AG) report on Tshwane, which was initially kept under wraps by former mayor Randall Williams before being tabled in council, revealed that more than R10 billion was spent in irregular expenditure during the financial year 2021-22.

Speaking at a media briefing alongside Cope deputy president Willie Madisha, party national spokesperson Dennis Bloem, provincial secretary Mxolisi Ntobela and regional secretary Terrence Manama, Makwarela said improving service delivery was urgent – citing repairing potholes and providing clean drinking water among key priorities.

“The AG has clearly said that when it comes to service delivery, Tshwane is completely off the rails. If you say R10 billion was wasted irregularly and you say that is not corruption, what is corruption?

“We should bear in mind this happened when the ANC was not in power. Service delivery has collapsed because people were sold lies by the DA. As coalition partners, the DA would not share the budget with us. But we would be frogmarched into voting for a budget we did not know.

“What we said in our service delivery business implementation plan – an annual plan of the municipality detailing your key performance indicators versus targets – was chalk and cheese.”

Crumbling municipal coalitions

Asked how he planned to maintain a sustainable government against a background of crumbling unstable coalitions at municipal level, he said:

“Coalitions are a marriage – worse when there are multiple partners involved, with different interests and different priorities, but we try to arrive at a common value system and priorities.

“In practice, people do not practise what they preach – something I have seen in the DA coalition. Cope was kicked out of the DA coalition although there is a clause on dispute resolutions and how to escalate points of discord with one another.

“There is a local structure managing day-to-day issues and a structure where provincial and national leaders sit. But you still have strings on the third-tier level of structure – instructing the local structure on how to behave.

ActionSA and DA war

“Half the time, instructions are not aligned to conditions on the ground. While some of us try to play by the rules, some local structures escalate issues to their technical and national leaders.

“Those who are overly represented put pressure on those who are under-represented, with the voices of our national leaders drowned in that structure.

ActionSA and the DA are warring cousins in that relationship – fighting like kids.

“We have taken a position that we cannot be in a coalition that cannibalises our existence as a party, because we have our own values.”