Durban – While opposition parties have welcomed the intervention by the provincial government in eThekwini Municipality, they say the municipality is in a dire state and should have been placed under administration.
The provincial government announced on Tuesday that Michael Sutcliffe and Cassius Lubisi will be deployed to the municipality to assist it amid serious concerns over governance in the municipality.
DA councillor Thabani Mthethwa said the DA welcomed the long overdue Section 154 intervention in the City.
“While the government should have long recognised the dire situation in eThekwini, the appointment of former Presidency director-general Cassius Lubisi to lead the intervention is promising.”
However, Mthethwa said it was with great concern that the party noted that the intervention came after significant damage was caused to the municipality.
“The DA had repeatedly called for intervention and raised alarm bells about the mismanagement, corruption, and service delivery failures that plagued eThekwini. It is regrettable that both the provincial and national government failed to act promptly when the signs of decay were evident.
“The use of Section 154 has not yielded the desired results in other municipalities and we still believe that a Section 139 intervention is the best possible solution for eThekwini and its people,” he said.
He said the current state of the municipality, with its failure to spend grants, serious allegations against the city manager, and several other governance issues, could have been avoided if the provincial and national governments had listened to the party’s intervention requests two years ago.
ActionSA provincial chairperson Zwakele Mncwango said it was no secret that the eThekwini metro faces a number of challenges and weaknesses both politically and administratively which has resulted in crumbling infrastructure, lack of basic service delivery, unauthorised and irregular expenditure, failure to spend grants on time, as well as the lack of consequence management among other issues.
“There is lack of appreciation amongst municipal leaders for the dire state the metro is in, and while political parties such as the EFF and NFP give their unwavering support to the ANC to continue leading the municipality into the ground, we are cautiously optimistic that the former director-general in the Presidency, Mr Cassius Lubisi, who is set to spearhead the intervention, will result in some positive interventions to improve the running of the municipality,” he said.