On Friday, 21 July 2023, the Select Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs of Parliament visited the City of Tshwane to receive an update on the City’s finances and our response to the findings of the Auditor-General.
Having respect for Parliament and being candid about the challenges that the City has to overcome in achieving financial recovery, the City Manager and I gave a detailed presentation on what we have undertaken to secure the City’s financial sustainability.
I have described the City’s financial position as critical but recoverable, and I regard the City’s adverse audit finding as a wake-up call to restore or otherwise install systems and controls that have been neglected or have never existed in the City.
During the Parliamentary oversight engagement, the Chair of the Select Committee, Mr Thamsanqa “China” Dodovu, did not pose any questions throughout the deliberations, nor did he seem to have much understanding of local government (alarming, since he has held his positions for some years).
At the end of the meeting, Mr Dodovu made a long, rambling speech in which he referred to the “unlawful act” of the City’s unfunded budget, apparently ignorant of the City’s funding plan which had just been presented to him in some detail. The National Treasury has also endorsed this plan.
It was at this point that the hapless Mr Dodovu announced that he had been part of the select committee that had voted to dissolve the City’s municipal Council in 2020, a decision that was overturned as unlawful and unconstitutional by the country’s highest court seven months later.
In terms of Section 139 of the Constitution, the Select Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (a committee of the National Council of Provinces) has a role in deciding on interventions in municipalities. In the case of the unlawful decision to dissolve the City’s Council in March 2020, the majority of the Select Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs failed to apply its mind (having clearly received political marching orders).
The same mindlessness was on display when Mr Dodovu issued a statement this weekend attacking the City and calling its financial situation an “embarrassment”.
A second-rate political apparatchik of the first order, Dodovu clearly has no sense of his own contribution to the City’s financial woes, nor does he have any shame.
In the financial year that the City’s Council was dissolved and placed under provincial administration, the City had a budget surplus exceeding R200 million.
After the disastrous period of administration presided over by the former ANC mayor of the West Rand District Municipality, Mpho Nawa, the City suffered a budget deficit exceeding R4 billion.
The DA had to approach several courts to have the dissolution of the City’s Council set aside. This was eventually achieved in October 2020, but for seven months the City was left without a municipal council to exercise any scrutiny over the decisions of a politically appointed administrator.
But Select Committee Chairman Dodovu, without whom the City would never have had to endure the disastrous “intervention” of the Gauteng Provincial Government, seems blissfully ignorant of his own culpability. Although quick to call out “embarrassment”, he seems to lack the self-awareness to experience embarrassment himself.
While the City respects Parliament and its committees, we want to sound a warning to Chairperson Dodovu: He too is not above scrutiny. If he abuses his position again in order to facilitate unlawful intervention in the City, the City will call for a cost order against him.
Cllr Cilliers Brink is Executive Mayor of City of Tshwane
