GMM mayor spits fire in council meeting
“Over the past years we paid Eskom over a billion rand trying to catch up with our debt instead of collecting meaning we were donating as the municipality,” said Zuma.
The Govan Mbeki Municipality Executive Mayor Nhlakanipho Zuma spat fire during the council meeting that was held on March 29.
Criticism of the draft integrated development plan, municipal employees who are in arrears on their consumer accounts and the municipality’s Eskom debt had the mayor hot under the collar.
He scolded councillors for keeping mum when the municipal administration is not implementing council resolutions. He said the council should take action against employees who misbehave.
Zuma also told councillors, who criticised the draft integrated development plan as bad for service delivery and wanted the document to be referred back, that the five-year plan adopted by the previous term’s councillors was compiled from the community’s needs.
“If there are errors in the document, let us rectify those mistakes. We cannot change what our community said they want,” said Zuma.
Zuma said if the council is serious about transforming the municipality, everything needs to change.
“Our budget was unfunded for years and we will not tell people that we will bring them water while there are no pipes, that is impossible.
“We have a population of 330 000 that need services. The national treasury has allocated a maximum of R72m to our municipality through various grants.
“We are supposed to have a R3.2b budget in this financial year, which means that R2.7b must come from us to implement our vision,” said Zuma.
The non-payment of services by the municipal employees became an issue when Daniel Khoza, EFF councillor, disagreed with CFO Morufo Moloto’s statement in a previous council meeting.
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Moloto said staff owing the municipality rates and taxes are coming forward to sign monthly deductions forms on their salaries, but that employees cannot be forced to sign this form.
Moloto said they cannot tamper with an employee’s salary without consent.
Khoza quoted the Municipal Systems Act of 2000 which allows the municipality to deduct employees’ salaries if they owe the municipality service money.
“The act says the municipality may deduct money from the employees who owe the municipality for three months and it doesn’t say with their concern,” said Khoza.
Zuma said council should look into what Khoza has said. He told the Section 79 and 80 committees to pull up their socks and perform their delegated functions.
Zuma also said some councillors keep on saying that GMM is the worse municipality that owes Eskom, forgetting that they are the municipality regardless of their political party affiliation.
He said this is going to be a difficult year because the Mpumalanga Premier Refilwe Mtsweni said no municipality is allowed to adopt an unfunded budget.
“When engaging the provincial treasury, it was clear that we were concentrating on Eskom debt instead of collecting revenue.
“Over the past years, we paid Eskom more than R1b to catch up with our debt instead of collecting our revenue. This means the municipality was just donating money,” said Zuma.
