Two mayors and a funeral — it may sound like a B-grade comedy, but it’s far from a laughing matter.
The troubled Ditsobotla municipality in North West is imploding once again and could be dissolved for the second time in just over a year. The record of dysfunction and chaos stretches back to at least 2017, when workers set fire to the municipal building.
But the past two weeks have been remarkable even by Ditsobotla standards. After council speaker Fikile Jakeni died on June 1, an acting speaker from the DA, Ronald Matlholoa, was elected in a messy — and possibly illegal — council session. And the mayor, Itumeleng Lethoko, an ANC defector now with the Patriotic Alliance (PA), was removed by a motion of no confidence — which was also possibly irregular.
To top it all, the DA opened itself to charges of hypocrisy by voting with its publicly declared enemy, the EFF, to elect a new mayor from a minority party, Thabo Nkashe of Forum 4 Service Delivery. When the ANC and the EFF did the same in Joburg, the DA was quickly on its high horse about “puppet mayors”.
Since this vote on June 8, ANC councillors have boycotted meetings and the council has been unable to reach a quorum to elect a permanent speaker.
Salaries have not been paid for May and June — but it is not hard to see why because the council has not submitted financials to the provincial government for the past six months.
“It’s a circus,” says North West Freedom Front Plus MPL Erns Kleynhans.
So there is confusion about the legal status of the speaker, the removal of Lethoko as mayor, the election of Nkashe as her successor — and also about the appointment of a municipal manager.
The ANC administration in Ditsobotla — the municipal administrative centre is in Lichtenburg — was dissolved by the national government last year due to political instability and infighting that was hobbling service delivery.
It’s a circus
— Erns Kleynhans
It had reached a crisis point.
Fresh elections held in December resulted in a hung council.
Lethoko was eventually installed after messy coalition talks. Only, before switching to the PA in 2016, she was one of the ANC mayors who had presided over the municipality’s decline. The council’s administration is ridden with corruption and nepotism, and a number of officials are suspended or facing disciplinary action.
During a visit to Lichtenburg in February, the FM found conditions dire. The municipal offices appeared to be run by gangsters rather than public servants. Service delivery had collapsed, roads were pocked with potholes, rubbish was piled in parks and on street corners, and there was a sense of desperation in the air. When Ditsobotla last submitted finances to the province it owed Eskom almost R1bn, and it failed to submit its financial statements to the auditor-general before the deadline for inclusion in the 2021/2022 municipal audit.
Leon Basson, leader of the DA in North West, tells the FM that the council is in limbo and parties are waiting for the provincial government to intervene.
Asked about the vote that resulted in Nkashe being named mayor, DA councillor Willie Pretorius prevaricates.
It’s not that the DA voted for him ... Yes, its members were in council and they voted individually
— Willie Pretorius, DA councillor
“It’s not that the DA voted for him,” he says. “Yes, its members were in council and they voted individually.”
Well, yes, they actually did vote with the EFF, he eventually acknowledges.
But that is neither here nor there, he says; it is very likely that the council is going to be dissolved once again.
Kleynhans says his party is getting legal advice but he does not believe the council will be dissolved again this close to the 2024 national election.
“But the situation is a copy and paste of 2022 [when it was previously dissolved]. In our view, the province has not done enough to intervene. Now there are legal questions over the acting speaker and whether he was able to call meetings, [and] if his election is found to be illegal, everything will be null and void.”
The PA also maintains that the acting speaker’s election was illegal, but it is not pursuing the matter.
The struggle for power in the municipality is intense, and it will take a miracle to turn the shambolic council around.
PA spokesperson Steve Motale cynically wished the DA “the very best of luck” in fixing the mess — a bit rich perhaps, coming from the party that has been trying to run things in Ditsobotla for the past four months.
The municipality is yet another manifestation of the fraught coalition politics into which South Africa is speeding, an environment in which parties across the spectrum ignore the needs of citizens as they blindly pursue power.
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