One upside to the City of Joburg council meetings descending into chaos is that it gives ward councillors like David Potter more time to log calls about power failures, burst pipes and potholes in their areas, the ward 102 representative says wryly.
Meetings that used to take three hours can now take up to 14, if the first two council meetings this year are anything to go by. Both descended into chaos — first, after a dispute over voting procedure turned nasty, and second after the ANC, EFF and other opposition groups walked out of the chamber.
As ActionSA councillor and former mayor Herman Mashaba explains it, Joburg’s councillors have so far done nothing to earn the salaries they’ve been drawing since the local government elections on November 1.
Yet the meetings haven’t been entirely futile. Last week, Colleen Makhubele of COPE was elected chair of chairs unopposed — after eight hours of back and forth, and after the EFF withdrew its nomination following a dispute over whether voting should happen by secret ballot or a show of hands. Council speaker Vasco da Gama ruled it should be an open vote, as has always been the case.
The council also managed to vote for a mayor last year, after almost a month of negotiations didn’t yield a firm majority coalition. In a surprise turn, however, the EFF and ActionSA on that occasion voted for DA candidates without prior agreement, meaning all three metros in Gauteng are now led by DA mayors. In Joburg, Mpho Phalatse is in the mayoral seat.
Instability in the city is not new. In 2019, for example, Mashaba resigned as DA mayor after only three years in office, and the ANC managed to negotiate a new governing coalition under Geoff Makhubo. After he died of Covid last year, he was succeeded by Jolidee Matongo, who died in a car crash just weeks later while on the campaign trail for the local government elections. Mpho Moerane was appointed for the few weeks that remained of the previous council’s term.
The current council is made up of 18 parties, which means coalitions are bound to be unstable.
"While the theatre goes on, we continue to respond to residents," Potter tells the FM. "It’s a great time to catch up on service-delivery issues."
Of 270 city councillors, 135 represent the wards around the city, and just over 40 of these are DA representatives. During the two chaotic council meetings, Potter says he could see some of his DA colleagues dealing with ward issues on their computers, while the proportional list councillors dealt with the fractious politicking.
Before 2016, when the ANC could still muster more than 50% of the vote in Joburg, there was a measure of stability in council. Then, meetings would start at 2pm and end at 5pm, Potter says. Now they can continue until after midnight.
But there is only so much ward councillors can do, even if they are trying to be proactive.
The DA holds a number of wards in established suburbs such as Auckland Park, Northcliff, the Randburg CBD, Westdene, Westbury and Bryanston, and the old infrastructure in these areas is creaking.
"They experience a larger number of service-delivery failures than newly developed areas," Potter says. Around the University of Johannesburg, for example, the electricity networks are so old that the power trips almost every time there is heavy rain.
While there has been some success in getting agencies such as City Power to be more responsive, maintenance and upgrading of the network requires a budget and planning. Which requires a working council.
And there’s no shortage of work to be done. First, there’s the election of oversight committee chairs this coming week — though that’s expected to pass without issue. Makhubele told eNCA last week that Da Gama simply needs to announce the 17 chairs; they ran unopposed after the ANC and EFF withdrew from the process.
More tricky may be the adjustments budget vote, due at the end of February. Though it’s not as big a deal as the main budget, which is passed in June or July, it involves the reallocation of funds for urgent projects, and requires a council vote to pass. The budget tabled for the current financial year totals R73.3bn.
The disruption game plan has limited political benefit for theANC in the short term
— Cilliers Brink
In what could signal some hope for stability, the DA (with 71 seats) last week managed to secure the co-operation of parties that, together with the DA, occupy 140 of the 270 council seats. That means a coalition of ActionSA (44 seats), the IFP (seven), Freedom Front Plus (four), ACDP (three), African Transformation Movement, United Independent Movement and COPE with one seat each, and the Patriotic Alliance (PA, with eight seats).
The PA only recently agreed to work with the coalition, but it’s a fragile set-up. The party has partnered with the ANC in other municipalities. Should its leaders change their minds about being part of the multiparty coalition in Joburg, things could descend into chaos again.
PA caucus chair Ashley Sauls said during a coalition press briefing last week that the party "will go with any party that ensures the PA receives the power to serve our people".
He wouldn’t say which portfolios the PA was negotiating for in return for its support. But if the DA is to hold up its end of the agreement, "then this will be a long-term arrangement", Sauls said.
ActionSA chief whip and MMC for transport Funzela Ngobeni tells the FM the parties’ negotiators are working to pass the annual reports, due this week, and the adjustment budget.
"Those are very important documents that need to be processed by council," he says.
More pressing is the appointment of a city manager. Floyd Brink, also the city’s COO, has been acting in that capacity for almost a year.
Already, ANC caucus leader and former mayor Moerane says his party wants a city manager who understands the diversity of the metro — the rich and poor areas — and "who will get into a car and drive to Diepsloot and say: ‘What is the problem?’"
He says the ANC will support only those candidates it deems suitable.
As for the annual reports, he doesn’t foresee any difficulties in securing sufficient votes to pass them. They were, after all, prepared by an ANC government just last year.
The ANC still has the most support of all the parties in the council, even if that totals only 33.6% of the vote. "We hold 87 out of the 135 wards," Moerane says. "It is in our interest to make sure that the city and the council work."
That’s not to say the earlier dispute is forgotten. On that count, Moerane says the ANC is likely to "go the legal route". The party believes its candidate for chair of chairs would have won if councillors had been allowed to vote by means of secret ballot.
In any event, the party will be keeping a close eye on the executive, given that it is ultimately responsible for service delivery.
"When the mayor was elected it took three weeks to put the mayoral committee together," he says. "I wrote a letter to [Phalatse] expressing our concern that the executive is accountable and responsible for service delivery, [but] you had departments that didn’t have political heads."
Meanwhile, residents are worried.
Daily Maverick journalist Ferial Haffajee has been tracking service delivery in the city. She says she received hundreds of replies to a tweet calling on residents to list issues in the city requiring urgent attention.
"There’s been an intensifying of collapse along the three key areas that are near to a crisis: roads, power and water," she says.
The data on each indicates that there are more water and electricity cuts, more burst pipes, and more potholes than before.
One of the reasons, Haffajee says, is that service delivery is managed and overseen by different agencies, including City Power, Joburg Water, Pikitup and the Joburg Roads Agency (JRA) — and their boards may include political deployees.
JRA chair Albert Mokoena, for example, was an IFP appointment — the party’s "reward" for its co-operation with the ANC in the previous coalition government.
Mokoena, also the IFP’s COO, was suspended in November after an investigation into board overreach. He was also previously fired by former president Thabo Mbeki after the media reported that he’d run a basketball enterprise from his office as director-general of home affairs.
Haffajee believes only the city’s working committees can provide effective oversight over the agencies — but these can only operate with a functional coalition in place.
"Another problem is that the entire administration of the council is deeply politicised, and getting them behind a new government is a mission," she says, referencing cadre deployment in local government.
Phalatse tells the FM that appointments in her administration will be based on "fitness for the purpose of the office people are selected for". Mayoral committee member for group corporate & shared services Leah Knott will oversee this process.
There are 18 different parties in the Joburg council, which means coalitions are likely to be unstable
— What it means:
There is speculation that the ANC aims to collapse the council, forcing the provincial government — under ANC control — to intervene.
This is allowed under section 139 of the constitution if a municipality fails to fulfil one or more of its executive obligations.
It’s happened before — in the Tshwane metro, under DA control. That intervention was a disaster, says DA local government spokesperson Cilliers Brink.
"In the nine months from March to October 2020, the ANC provincial administrators managed to turn the city’s operating surplus into a R4.3bn deficit," he tells the FM. "Basic functions such as revenue collection and the issuing of clearance certificates ground to a halt. The city’s credit rating was downgraded four notches."
The move was eventually overturned by the courts, which found local government MEC Lebogang Maile had failed to do his job of enforcing the code of conduct for councillors when ANC and EFF representatives prevented the council from having quorate meetings.
"Provinces owe municipalities a constitutional duty of support, and this means they have to consider less intrusive steps before barging in and grabbing power," Brink says.
He believes the ANC and EFF’s big problem in Joburg is that the parties can’t agree on a coalition of their own. But even if they were to swing a rerun of elections in Joburg, they’d still fail to secure a majority, he says.
"So, the disruption game plan has limited political benefit for the ANC in the short term," says Brink.
Meanwhile, Potter continues to log problems, such as ditches where pipes have been replaced but the JRA has yet to seal the road. Some have filled with rainwater.
One is near the Randburg taxi rank, where children cross the road from school; there’s another outside Bordeaux Primary school.
"It’s been like that for months and months," says Potter, "and small kids can’t manage the risk factor."
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