Motions of no confidence in mayors abused

Something strange has crept into countrywide local politics this year with political parties brazenly using ‘the motion of no confidence in the mayor’ to settle political scores. Not to be outdone, in George the strange has become the absurd.

The EFF has twice tried to table a motion of no confidence in the mayor of the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality, Athol Trollip, in a bid to punish the DA for not supporting the EFF’s policy of land expropriation without compensation recently proposed in the National Assembly.

In Cape Town the DA, the ruling party with an outright majority, tabled a motion of no confidence in their own mayor, Patricia de Lille, as the party doesn’t seem to have the confidence to oust her, fearing a political backlash in their stronghold, Mitchell’s Plain. The DA hierarchy says she has brought the party into disrepute by frequently criticising it in public.

The burden of removing De Lille has now landed squarely in the lap of the DA Cape Town city councillors who were mandated to table the motion, hoping that it would be carried. After all, the opposition parties have been gunning the mayor for years. But alas, it failed by one vote. Now the DA caucus in the city will have an additional arrow in its quiver, the so-called ‘recall clause’, or as political pundits calls it, the ‘De Lille clause’, hastily adopted at its federal congress last month in Tshwane.

The situation in George is even more bizarre than in PE and Cape Town as the ANC has tabled a motion of no confidence in the deputy mayor, Charlotte Clarke, now acting mayor, and the speaker, Gerrit Pretorius. The logic boggles the mind as, when the Hawks swooped on the George Municipality on Monday 23 April for a search and seizure operation, they visited the house of the mayor, Melvin Naik and the municipal manager, Trevor Botha. Instead of trying to unseat the mayor for his alleged misdemeanours the official opposition has targeted his deputy and the speaker who don’t seem to have any dirt on them.

Implausible as it may seem, the mayor of George is free of the scorn from the opposition. The only reasonable explanation is that the factionalism within the DA has reached boiling point. It is an open secret that eight DA councillors are colluding with the ANC in an attempt to wrest control from the regional DA’s handpicked team.

The problem facing the eight is that their motives are not solely to improve service delivery, but they have a questionable personal agenda for positions, not popular with the voters.

Secondly, the parties that make up the opposition range from the far left to the far right, making it a bitter pill to swallow to put the ANC in power locally while being sworn enemies nationally. Furthermore, one councillor often lost to unpredictable spells of nonattendance, some occupying the moral high ground, while others have hopped from one party to another in the not too distant past.

For political expediency we can sum up the situation locally with the ancient proverb, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’. The problem the eight have, is that they must define who their bigger enemy is. If it is their own party then we are in for six by-elections as they will be stripped of their party membership and their seat on council when they emerge from the closet. If it is the opposition then they will have to tread water until the next municipal elections in three years’ time.

The missing link in the whole saga is what the Hawks are looking at. Until a charge sheet is forthcoming, everything you hear is idle talk and idle talk is gossip and gossip leads to problems.

Who wants to live in Hawaii? Even the Kilauea volcano that erupted last week is not as hot as the politics in George. Bring on the by-elections.