Durban - Leader of the Abantu Batho Congress (ABC) party and deputy mayor of eThekwini Municipality, Philani Mavundla, has given a tongue-lashing warning to what he termed incompetent officials who had for a long time run down the city.
Mavundla’s party, ABC, recently held a media breakfast briefing at Coastlands Hotel, where he touched on various issues, including his party’s challenges in the coalition government in the eThekwini Municipality.
Among these, he expressed his unhappiness with the manner in which some members of the coalition government had taken decisions behind his back.
“It is worrying that even when we thought we were in a coalition, many of the decisions were taken behind our backs, in meetings held at night in dodgy corners. And as you may now know, as a matter of a public record, we also learnt of the dossiers in the media of the leaked information on who was going to be appointed.
“In the past few months, we have made the governing party account for the wrongdoings we have discovered, and together with the coalition minority group, we did not let things lie wherever we have felt governance was compromised.
“A good example of this is the now famous stance we took not to vote with the ANC in the city manager appointment saga.
“This is us showing that too much power entrusted to vultures who do not care about the future of the natives, but their own political wagons and are power-hungry to rule the city with incompetency – that time has gone,” he said.
Mavundla said that there were a few clean officials in the city, but many were stifled by the big tycoons with power and ended up being suppressed by the corrupt majority.
Taking a swipe at Human Settlements and Public Works MEC, Jomo Sibiya, the deputy mayor said he was shocked by Sibiya’s move to centralise the flood relief funding.
As an executive committee chairperson of Human Settlements and Infrastructure in the region, Mavundla said he had discovered that even the provincial government was incompetent, as they failed to deliver to residents.
“The big brotherly approach to disaster management has nothing to do with what the MEC is alleging, but another scheme of making money for their selfish egos and self-interests. It is common cause that provincial departments are worse off than municipalities in terms of financial management, let alone the capacity to deliver as promised with all hands on deck.
“Many of the departments of the KZN government are under SIU (Special Investigating Unit) investigations due to Covid-19 funds mismanagement and corruption ranging from personal protection equipment to the provision of the famous blankets and inflated JoJo tanks.
“The declaration of local government by MEC Sibiya is useless, corrupt, incompetent and irresponsible,” Mavundla said.
“His statement is malicious and shows a leader who is overwhelmed and ready to do what KZN provincial departments did to the Covid-19 allocations.”
In response, Sibiya’s spokesperson, Ndabezinhle Sibiya, said the MEC and Mavundla had met other stakeholders, including on April 20, when a meeting was convened by the national Minister of Human Settlements, Mammaloko Kubayi, to discuss relief interventions.
Sibiya indicated that eThekwini had two sources of funding it could tap into: R539 143 from the Urban Settlement Development Grant and an additional R143 million that was recently allocated to the Informal Settlements Upgrade Partnership Grant.
“The MEC appreciated the hard work by Mavundla and promised to work with him and all other mayors to put an end to housing projects that take between five and 10 years to complete,” said Sibiya.
Daily News