North West municipalities have fallen apart
I WAS so flabbergasted last week when the North West provincial government seconded a former municipal manager of the troubled Kgetlengrivier local municipality to a cash-strapped Ramotshere Moiloa local municipality (RMLM) in a small farm town called Zeerust.
The birth of my displeasure is the fact that the person appointed helped to collapse another municipality, and now he is being appointed to further do what he is well-known for.
As if that was not enough, a former municipal manager of RMLM, whose contract ended earlier this month, was also seconded to Rustenburg local municipality by the provincial government. There is a pattern of rotating these municipal managers from one municipality to another.
Why does the appointment of municipal managers matter? They matter because the municipal managers are the heads of the municipal administration. They implement council resolutions. Municipal managers are known for enabling gross malfeasance in their respective municipalities.
While we, the communities, regard the municipal managers as good as useless, they remain useful tools to their political headmasters as they help to enrich individual politicians mostly in provincial or national government. In this case, the responsible MEC of local government makes his or her choice or the party’s choice, depending on who is more powerful between a party and the MEC.
In the case of the North West (NW), the ANC has recently elected its provincial leadership, and we are already seeing changes from the provincial to local government level. Nono Maloyi, ANC NW chairperson, ascended to become a member of the provincial legislature last week. This allows him to be appointed as the premier of the NW to replace a less popular Bushy Maape, who is not really known in the branches of the ANC in the province.
Maloyi is definitely using his political capital to entrench his faction into government at all levels. The appointment or seconding of these municipal managers will help to boost his faction at the upcoming ANC national conference in terms of awarding tenders to companies of their choice, which will certainly pay or give kickbacks to their political principals who appointed them to do their dirty jobs.
The NW mayors, speakers, and all councillors from municipalities who are not supporting Maloyi’s faction, known as N12, are betting on the court application seeking to nullify the ANC provincial conference which elected Maloyi and his provincial executive committee. The court verdict will have legal and political implications for the upcoming ANC national congress. They are also betting on the conference to re-elect Cyril Ramaphosa to safeguard their political future. Those who support the N12, which is running the province, are also fearful of the court and ANC conference outcomes.
The faction which gets a chance to hold power in municipalities around NW is not wasting time to loot public resources before they may be booted out of power, because it is now difficult to predict what will happen in terms of the court application before Mahikeng high court. These appointments or secondments by the provincial government have nothing to do with the communities, as they should do; they are about enriching and strengthening a particular faction within the ANC.