Trollip lives to see another day in mayoral seat
“Walkouts delay vital Nelson Mandela Bay council matters”
The 11th Nelson Mandela Bay council meeting since March collapsed yesterday after opposition parties staged a walkout of the council chamber.
The parties – ANC, EFF, UDM, AIC and United Front – had planned to boot out mayor Athol Trollip and the rest of the coalition government through no-confidence motions but backed out hours after the Patriotic Alliance (PA) pulled its support.
This left them without the one seat they needed to succeed in ousting Trollip and installing a new government.
Their walkout, however, has led to further delays in processing crucial municipal matters which have been on the council agenda since March.
It has led to a massive backlog of rezoning applications and delays in forging ahead with a housing project in Parsonsvlei, and it has stalled the city’s attempts to appoint a chief financial officer and executive director of public health.
Council also has until the end of month to write-off R8billion in irregular expenditure or face yet another qualified audit from auditor-general.
City manager Johann Mettler said the constant council adjournments have had a serious impact on administration.
“There are many land disposal and rezoning applications and other land applications that we must process through council,” Mettler said.
“If council does not sit before the end of August, we will again be in the unenviable position as having the most irregular expenditure on our books in the country.”
Yesterday, the opposition parties walked out of the scheduled council meeting after butting heads with speaker Jonathan Lawack over the late delivery of council agendas.
The councillors, who had been hounding Lawack for a special council sitting to debate the no-confidence motions against Trollip, Lawack and chief whip Werner Senekal, said participating in yesterday’s sitting would have been constituted as “illegal”.
They said agendas were not delivered within prescribed five working days because with last week’s public holiday, it meant they only had four working days to peruse the agendas.
After 30 minutes of arguments between them and Lawack, who said there were problems with the printers, they eventually walked out, leaving the 60 coalition councillors of the DA, Cope, ACDP and PA in the chamber.
To hold a meeting, there needs to be 61 councillors in the chamber to constitute a quorum.
The move followed the decision by the PA on Wednesday to back down from its earlier statement that it would support the removal of Trollip and install a new government.
Trollip said the walkout was a clearly orchestrated move from the opposition to collapse the meeting. “This is now the umpteenth time, I can’t even remember how many times we have been here and the socalled motion has not materialised,” Trollip said.