Politics.za

Read the following quotes from this article (no peeking) and try and guess who is the subject.

Western Cape municipalities should be cautious when changing the political leadership of their councils.
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“Service delivery is very important. A previous mayor may have had a particular leadership style or set a specific tone, but, if that person leaves, the council could immediately lose momentum when someone else comes with a new approach.”

If you guessed Richard Diyanti, who had previously tried to “stabilise” the Cape Town DA led coalition by changing the form of municipal government and removing Mayor Helen Zille from any practical power, then give yourself a round of applause.

And to add insult to injury read this final quote:

If we did not have provincial government supporting municipalities, intervening and monitoring them, you would have a mess.

Why those municipalities are like little kids totally unable to control themselves. If it wasn’t for us responsible parents here at provincial government it would be chaos! CHAOS!

A deal has been reached between Mayor Zille and MEC for Local Government Richard Diyanti that will see the DA coalition retain control of the executive mayoral committee. In return two new subcouncils are to be created with extra ward committees. I assume those new subcouncils will be ANC controlled.

This seems to be quite a PR victory for the DA who managed to successfully go toe to toe with the ANC.

The biggest losers though are the ID. If the DA and ANC start working more closely together they will be completely left out in the cold. When (if?) the floor crossing period opens again I expect them to take a serious hit. Which is why they’re trying to take credit for the ANC backing down, as can be seen in this quote from ID caucus leader Simon Grindrod:

“We are glad that the ANC heeded our call to ‘immediately halt this power grab’,” says Grindrod.

The Independent Democrats(ID) continues to have issues with their own councillors in the Western Cape. After the resignation (and re-election as a DA member) by Sheval Arendse the also expelled Achmat Williams but he has now won an interdict allowing him to return to his seat. I’m not sure if he will return officially as part of the ID (but certainly not listening to ID leadership) or as an independent member.

However it seems the ID has even more troubles to worry about:

But Grindrod has said that at least five councillors have been reprimanded by the party’s leadership for not doing their work in their communities and who were siding with those who face party disciplinary action.

ID councillor David Sasman, a former party whip, failed to turn up at his disciplinary hearing on Friday on charges that include criticising the party’s leadership, not attending caucus meetings and failing to do his work.

If new elections were to be hypothetically held tomorrow I wonder how the ID would do?

I’ll be honest with you, I thought the DA led ‘March for Democracy’ was not a very effective idea. The DA knows that any protest action will have no effect (the ANC doesn’t respond when it’s own voters when they protest and they’ve been protesting a lot lately) so the march was little more than a well attended press conference.

The post-march sniping from the DA about the ANC organising competing taxi protests made it even worse. Firstly taxi protests are not new in Cape Town, especially illegal ones a they’ve happened with regularity over the past few years and I have no doubt they will increase in frequency as government clamps down on unsafe taxi and begins (hopefully) the rollout of the taxi recapitalisation program. There’s also the fact that that besides Cape Town there were protests in other cities , and the protests have continued to happen.

Because of the aforementioned recapitalisation program the taxi industry and the ANC led government are not exactly best friends at the moment. In fact I wouldn’t be suprised that had the ANC actually asked the taxi industry to strike during the march, the taxi bosses would have turned around and done their best to transport even more DA supporters to the march. There’s also the fact that Mayor Zille has had discussions with Minister for Local Government Sydney Mufamadi earlier this morning which left her “warmly encouraged”, a marked change from the rhetoric heard at the march.

The accusations of ANC/taxi industry collusion from the DA in my opinion just make the DA look like they’re playing the victim card, an image I feel they should be getting away from. And please for love of all that is good will the DA please keep Tony Leon away from a microphone till he has learned some Xhosa/Zulu/Sotho.

Here’s an interesting fact I found while looking through my archives. In May 2006 following the local elections Richard Diyanti turned down the request of ANC council members to place the council under administration. At that time Diyanti found there was “no basis” for intervention. At that time he said he only had two areas of concern: the interim heads of portfolios (who I assume are now properly appointed) and Wallace Mgoqi (who was given the boot later that month).

Now placing the council under administration is different than forcing the council to a adopt a new format however at the time Diyanti was unwilling to do so because there was no breakdown in service delivery

Dyantyi said concerns about service delivery and malfunctioning in municipalities were viewed in a serious light, so he had carefully considered the request.

The justification used by Diyanti now, that the council is not sufficiently representative of the electorate, seems almost absurd by comparison when you consider that service delivery is supposed to be the number one priority of government.

It looks like Richard Diyanti’s move to grab the Cape Town council from the DA might be hitting a few snags. Firstly it seems that there are some in the ANC who are suffering from a bit of ‘democratic remorse’ and are thinking maybe you know they should just respect the outcome of the municipal election.

The second reason why it might hit a snag is oh so ironic. Back in 2002 when the ANC took control of the Cape Town municipality via floor crossing the DA took the ANC to court to try and get seats on the new created executive mayoral committee. If seats were to be given out according to proportion of votes received the DA would have received 4 of the 10 mayoral council seats. Except that the ANC successfully argues that the DA only had to be ‘broadly represented’ and not ‘directly represented’ and they were only given two seats on council and denied any portfolio positions.

And now this same ruling could come back and bite the ANC. According to this ruling the ANC may only be entitled to one or two seats with the ID also receiving a single seat and the DA the rest.

Despite often going head to head with the Presidency and the Minister of Health, Zackie Achmat is still a card carrying member of the ANC. Indeed in my one brief conversation I had with him a while ago he seemed upbeat on the ANC, believing the TAC’s issues with government were more the fault of Mbeki/Msimang than the policy of the ANC itself.

So it’s suprising to see that Achmat (along with the TAC) is so far opposed to Local Government MEC Richard Diyanti’s move to restructure the Cape Town Council calling it “undemocratic”. He even went so far as to call it “the ANC’s attempt at a power grab”, so perhaps he’s grown a bit tiresome of the ANC since I last spoke to him.

But it seems to be getting even worse for Diyanti with SACTWU one of the larger COSATU unions asking to have a meeting with Diyanti to ask about the proposed changes, although I’m unsure of whether they’re actually opposed to the changes or just ticked off because they were not consulted beforehand.

It’s official. Western Cape MEC for Local Government Richard Diyanti has notified Cape Town Mayor Helen Zille thay he intends to reorganise the Cape Town council into an executive committee type system. This system would make the mayor largely ceremonial and place most of the power in a 10 person committee which would comprise of the DA (4 seats), the ANC (4 seats) and the ID (2 seats) although the linked article mentions it might be DA:4/5 ANC:4 ID:1 ACDP:1(?), with the smaller parties (ACDP who may or may not get a seat, FF+, AMP) shut out.

Prior to their election victory the DA claimed preference for the executive committee model when it seemed possible the ID would join them in a coalition. When the ID decided to back the ANC in the mayoral vote the DA were basically left with no choice but to stay with the executive mayoral system or face defeat.

Diyanti justifies the move saying that an executive committee would be more ‘stable’ and the executive committee would be more ‘inclusive’. Which begs the question. So when is Tony Leon (or Joe Seremans considering the ANC’s distate for Leon) getting his ‘inclusive’ cabinet position? Sure the ANC received 69% of the national vote but with the DA that would be an even more inclusive 80%! If Diyanti was so worried about stability he might want to recommend that floor crossing be scrapped as it’s probably the single greatest cause of upheaval in local councils (usually in the ANC’s favour though).

Here’s a telling quote from the ANC’s Max Ozinsky:

The recent local government election did not produce a clear winner and at the moment only half of the voters are represented in the mayoral committee, leaving the other half outside.

Will someone please call a whaaaaambulance? Perhaps someone should remind Max that the ANC were the ones who introduced the executive mayoral committee system in the first place and during their time in power excluded the DA from it. He also doesn’t mention that every single other council in the Western Cape uses the executive mayoral system currently. Max also somehow implies that the ANC is somehow totally shut out of the political process which is not true as while they are not on the mayoral committee they still have 88 votes on the council and also does not consider such facts that the budget that was passed in May was largely drawn up by the previous ANC committee and that the new city manager appointed by the DA, Achmat Ebrahim, was a member of the ANC’s management team.

Business Day had an opinion piece yesterday that called such a move as smelling of ANC desperation. The guys at Commentary say it show’s the disrespect the ANC shows towards the democratic process. DA Mal, who comments on the Commentary thread, seems suprisingly upbeat and indicates he believes this will probably be killed in the courts and should it go through the ANC will suffer in subsequent provincial and local elections.

Now what about the ID? Well give them credit they have been consistent from even before the elections that they preferred an executive committee system and obviously they stand to gain if this change goes through. However if you consider the beatdown the ID took when it sided with the ANC during the council mayoral vote and the near revolt amongst it’s members they will have to be be very careful not to fuel further uprising if they are seen as helping the ANC in this. If the reforms do indeed go through I wouls assume that the ID would be siding more with the DA than the ANC, especially after the DA successfully picked up the council seat in Tafelsig after the ID councillor (Sheval Arendse who then ran under the DA) resigned from the ID in protest of their support of the ANC’s mayoral candidate.

Finally I’d like to mention that as of a month ago in the Eastern Cape, three of the largest municipalities were so rife with infighting in the ANC that they have yet to actually appoint mayors. And yet I have yet to hear of the Eastern Cape provincial government intervening there despite the complete chaos and shambles those councils are in when compared to Cape Town.

Despite previously claiming to have given up the quest to unseat Cape Town Mayor Helen Zille in order to focus on calming it’s internal party rifts, there seems to be a rumour that the ANC/ID will try and get provincial Local Government MEC Richard Dyanti to reform the Cape Town City Council under a multiparty executive committee, thereby making the mayor little more than a ceremonial figurehead and forcing the inclusion of the ANC and ID onto the executive committee.

There were rumours that this would be done just after the DA took power in Cape Town but that didn’t pan out. As mentioned previously the ANC in the Western Cape has previously made statements that they were giving up trying to remove Zille from power so that’s another strike against this rumour. There’s also the fact that this law should only to be used (I hope) in cases where a council is completely useless and needs external intervention, a case that does not apply to Cape Town.

Update: Helen Zille is battening down the hatches and getting ready for a potential court fight should this happen.

After having his final petition to appeal dismissed by the Court of Appeals, fired Cape Town city manager Wallace Mgoqi will finally have to vacate his office on the 5th floor of the Civic Centre.