Pretoria - Residents in the City of Tshwane have been left in limbo after the municipality once again failed to pass an adjustment budget for 2022/2023.
Council’s failure to pass a budget during yesterday’s special council meeting at Tshwane House was attributed to several caucus breaks requested by different political parties.
Speaker Mncedi Ndzwanana, who granted the last caucus break for 30 minutes to the ANC at 4.15pm, also warned that there was a standing council agreement that meetings should not go beyond 5pm.
As a result of prolonged caucuses, Ndzwanana made a call to adjourn the meeting and reconvene today.
He, however, appealed to political parties to think about residents who were in need of service delivery and work together “to approve or disapprove this budget”.
“The prolonged caucuses are not fair to the citizens of the city. Since we came this morning (yesterday) all we have been doing is caucus after caucus as if there is something you have taken to make our stomachs run,” he said.
The adjournment comes after the City had pleaded twice with the Gauteng provincial treasury for extension to pass the budget, after the council missed its February 28 deadline for doing so due to political instability.
The Treasury granted the City an extension for passing its adjustment budget before April 15. The council meeting was convened under looming threats of placing the metro under the Gauteng provincial government administration should it fail to meet the April 14 deadline for passing an adjustment budget.
During the meeting, EFF chief whip Godwin Ratikwane accused the multiparty coalition of “taking our funds from the township and redirecting it to suburban areas”.
He said his party caucus had also discovered many other bad things contained in the adjustment budget.
The party was vocal that it wouldn’t support the budget, which didn’t make allocations towards the insourcing of security guards and formalisation of informal settlements.
Regional party leader Obakeng Ramabodu said the EFF had been championing the insourcing of security guards and that the first phase of the programme was implemented under former mayor Solly Msimanga.
He said: “If the budget will have the insourcing of security guards and will have the formalisation of informal settlements, why not support it because we are not the government and we can’t list even the 24-hour clinic?
“We will only list two priorities that we think must be part of the budget.”
He said the party’s stance was that it would not support the budget if it only accommodated affluent areas such as Waterkloof, Pretoria East and Centurion.
ANC chief whip Aaron Maluleke expressed his party’s wish for a budget to be passed, but said there was still contention among political parties regarding service delivery priorities that ought to be factored into the budget.
DA caucus chair Jacqui Uys said on Wednesday that an adjustment budget was to ensure that money was allocated where the money needed to be allocated. She said there was a R500 million allocation to focus on illegal dumping and waste clearance.
“This is something that we need across the city, and specifically more in our poorer areas. So, to come and say that this budget is not pro-poor, I strongly disagree with that.
“This is a service delivery budget; it is the budget that needs to focus on what the core mandate of the municipality is, which is well-lit and maintained streets, cleaning of streets, and water and electricity,” Uys said.
Pretoria News