Outrage over eThekwini’s calendar
OPPOSITION parties in the eThekwini municipality are spitting mad over their exclusion from the city’s official 2018 calendar‚ which only features the faces of ANC councillors from the executive committee.
The calendar‚ reportedly already up in some municipal offices‚ has large pictures of eThekwini mayor Zandile Gumede and deputy Fawzia Peer, and six head-and-shoulder pictures of ANC councillors.
But DA councillors Zwakele Maxwell Mncwango‚ Sharon Hoosen and Heinz de Boer and IFP councillor Mduduzi Samuel Nkosi‚ who are all in the executive committee‚ did not make it onto the calendar.
Durban’s eThekwini municipality is a multiparty council, with three parties represented in the exco and more than five at full council level.
DA caucus leader Mncwango has written to city manager Sipho Nzuza‚ saying the calendar is defective in that it only contains the pictures of the ANC members of the exco.
“In the past‚ the official calendars have shown the photos of all the members of the executive committee‚ irrespective of which party they represent in council.
“There cannot possibly be any justifiable reason for the 2018 calendar not to show the photos of all exco members‚” he said.
He called for distribution of the calendars to be halted‚ a recall of all those already distributed and for new calendars to be printed. Mayor Gumede was the subject of ridicule in December 2016 when she gave 200 councillors a Christmas gift of a framed photo of herself.
The DA called for a formal investigation to be conducted within 14 days to identify who was responsible for the new calendar.
The party also wants to know within seven days how many were printed‚ how many distributed and what they cost.
IFP caucus leader Mdu Nkosi also wants an explanation.
But mayoral spokesman Mthunzi Gumede said those in the calendar were “cluster chairpersons” who were also members of the exco.
He said it was unfortunate that such “a wonderfully informative calendar has been reduced to a political football”. –