Pretoria - The ANC has accused the DA of regressing service delivery progress made by the party before it lost power in Tshwane in 2016.
ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula yesterday lamented the state of service delivery and governance in Tshwane during a media briefing at Mamelodi’s Solomon Mahlangu Square ahead of the party’s march tomorrow “to reclaim the municipality”.
Mbalula, who is expected to lead the march under the banner #BuyaTshwane people’s campaign, was joined by Gauteng ANC leadership and alliance partners.
He said the campaign was about appealing to residents to work with the ANC to reclaim the city and bring about a better life to all people in the metro.
“Our councillors are chased and their houses burnt down because communities think that it is them who don’t bring service to them. They go to the council and the DA coalition doesn’t listen to them. They bulldoze them because they have the majority,” he said.
The ANC believed that the emergence of coalition governments at local government level “is a product of unintended consequences of service delivery lapses and intractable governance challenges faced by successive ANC local government leadership over the years”, he said.
He slated coalition politics in Tshwane under DA leadership, which he said “has very little to do with tackling the plight of poor black African people, who are in the majority”.
“It is an open secret that the DA agenda remains the advancing of other political interests that do not include addressing the plight of the poor. The Tshwane City council experienced instability when the governing DA-led coalition collapsed after only two years in office.”
Mbalula also lambasted previous DA mayor Solly Msimanga for awarding a contract to engineering consultants GladAfrica, which was subsequently declared unlawful by the Auditor-General.
And under former mayor Randall Williams, the City was found by the Auditor-General to have incurred R10 billion in irregular expenditure and unauthorised expenditure of more than R600 million, he said.
“Fruitless and wasteful expenditure understated by more than R1 billion, and unjustified supply chain management deviations of over R480 million,” Mbalula said.
He said the DA in Tshwane had over the past seven years focused on producing scandals and paid scant regard to service delivery outcomes.
“This is the reason the ANC, its alliance partners and civil society will lead the #BuyaTshwane people’s march. As the ANC, we believe that it is no small feat when the capital city struggles to achieve stability. The people of Tshwane deserve better.
“Under the DA multiparty coalition, R85 million was paid to workers who never worked in the Environment Project, the revenue division has all but collapsed and the city fleet was recalled, and there is no tender in place,” he said.
Mbalula cited other failures of the DA as being the cancellation of Employee Work Initiative Programmes and wi-fi services all over the city.
Residents, he said, were struggling with access to roads and transport networks because the bus rapid transport system was no longer functioning in most parts of the capital.
“The DA has claimed that where they govern, they govern better. Tshwane is a glaring demonstration that the opposite is true. We must ask the hard question: What has happened to all these initiatives and others intended to improve the lives of the people of Tshwane? This pattern of skewed service delivery, governance lapses, runs across all DA-led metros in varying degrees.
“This includes the City of Cape Town, Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni. This is the truth behind the lie that DA-governed metros fare better,” Mbalula said.
Gauteng ANC leader and Premier Panyaza Lesufi, who was part of the briefing, said he was privy to the Auditor-General report that indicated that an account of the City was hacked and people stole millions of rand, which was not disclosed to the A-G.
DA Gauteng leader Msimanga said: “It is laughable that they now want to be a saviour for the problems that they caused.”
When the DA took over Tshwane it was a bankrupt municipality inherited from the ANC, he said.
Many of the contracts Mbalula and the Auditor-General were referring to were signed under the ANC, he said.
Msimanga challenged Mbalula to talk about ANC cadre deployment, which he said created a number of problems in municipalities.
“He should also address the thuggish behaviour of his councillors.”
The ANC can’t expect the mess it caused in Tshwane for almost 30 years to be fixed in about five years or so, Msimanga said.
He blamed a team of administrators appointed by the ANC-led provincial government in 2020 for “reversing some of the gains the DA made in five years”.
Tomorrow’s march was against the mess caused by the ANC, Msimanga said.
Meanwhile, council Speaker Mncedi Ndzwanana, who was elected earlier this week, has called a special sitting tomorrow to elect a new mayor.
Pretoria News