Opposition parties walk out of CoM council’s special meeting

MBOMBELA - Opposition parties walked out of the most recent council meeting at the City of Mbombela’s (CoM) chambers last Thursday.

The special meeting was scheduled so the CoM’s mayor could present the municipality’s adjusted budget for 2024.

The FF Plus councillor, Ken Robertson, said: “We feel the speaker was in violation of Section 160 (8) of the South African Constitution and did not act in good faith in the belowmentioned constitutional requirement, that members of a municipal council are entitled to participate in its proceedings and those of its committees in a manner that (a) allows parties and interests reflected within the council to be fairly represented; (b) is consistent with democracy; and (c) may be regulated by national legislation.”

He added that the rules and standing orders allow councillors to receive the agenda 48 hours prior to a sitting and study them to warrant an educated opinion of important matters.

“In this case, we were informed 10 minutes before the council meeting that important items on the agenda had suddenly been retracted and were not going to be discussed. We were not afforded the opportunity to request why these recommendations were suddenly retracted, as our debate on these matters was shut down by the speaker. This is unacceptable, and we will challenge the validity of this meeting in the provincial government arena.”

The the DA walked out after the FF Plus.

The DA’s chief whip, Cyril Chuene, said the meeting was illegal because the councillors had not received the agenda on time.

He emphasised that they were supposed to receive the agenda 48 hours before the meeting.

He said some of the recommendations were removed from the agenda without the speaker informing them. “We are going to write to the MEC for co-operative governance and traditional affairs, Mandla Msibi, to nullify the council meeting. The speaker did not follow the rules of the council,” he said.

The EFF was the last opposition party to leave the chamber and said they did so because they did not agree with the adjusted budget, as it did not state in the document where the municipality was going to source the money from.

“Also, some of the recommendations that were removed from the agenda had to do with corruption, and some of the officials were supposed to be arrested. We were not going to sit and agree on something that we know is wrong. We want all the recommendations to be part of the agenda. We were expecting the police here today and that did not happen,” they said afterwards.

The ACDP had also left the council meeting for the same reasons.

The CoM’s speaker, William Nkatha, said what the councillors did was uncalled for because there are rules that legislate council meetings. He insisted that the council had followed these.

“However, even if the opposition parties were not happy about certain things or did not agree with them, they were not supposed to walk out of the meeting. They have raised their matter and I responded to them. I had asked them to find a way to do what is right and they decided to leave. We were not going to force them to stay if they had made up their minds that they wanted to leave,” he said.

Nkatha also said the municipality would be in touch with all the councillors to discuss a way forward, but did not not give any more details.