Pretoria - The ANC has accused the DA of regressing service delivery progress in the City of Tshwane made by the party before it lost power in the metro in 2016.
This was said by ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula, who lamented the state of service delivery and governance in Tshwane during a media briefing in Mamelodi’s Solomon Mahlangu Square ahead of the party’s march on Friday to reclaim the municipality.
Mbalula, who is expected to lead the march under the banner #BuyaTshwane people's campaign, was joined by the Gauteng ANC leadership and the alliance partners.
He said the campaign was about appealing to the Tshwane residents to work together 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 are 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.
He said the ANC believed that the emergence of coalition governments at local government level “is a product of unintended consequence of service delivery lapses and intractable governance challenges faced by successive ANC local government leadership over the years”.
He slated coalition politics in Tshwane under the 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,” he said.
He pointed out that under former mayor Randall Williams the City was found by the Auditor-General to have incurred a R 10 billion irregular expenditure and unauthorised expenditure of over R 600 million.
"Fruitless and wasteful expenditure understated by over R1 billion, and unjustified SCM deviations of over R 480 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 of our country struggles to achieve stability. The people of Tshwane deserve better. Under the DA multi-party 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.
He cited other failures of the DA as being the cancellation of the Employee Work Initiative Programmes and wi-fi services all over the city.
Residents, he said, were currently struggling with access to road services and transport networks because the Bus Rapid Transport system was no longer functioning in most parts of the capital city.
“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 Panyaza Lesufi, who was part of the briefing, said he was privy to the AG report that indicated that an account of the city was hacked and people stole millions of rands, which was not disclosed to the AG.
Pretoria News