Buffalo City Metro has become the first local authority to name and shame councillors for failing to hold ward committee meetings and foster public participation in local governance issues.
A total of 15 Buffalo City Metro (BCM) ward councillors who failed to organise meetings in their communities as required by law, were outed by council speaker Alfred Mtsi last week.
One of the councillors named would have taken the number of truant councillors to 16, but Mlandeli Ngabayena, of ward 21 (Mdantsane NU13 and NU12 West and Riverine), was ill and died on March 7 this year.
Mtsi, in his report to Wednesday’s council meeting, revealed that some of the councillors even tried to doctor their progress reports by plagiarising minutes of previous meetings.
Of the 50 ward councillors in the metro, only six convened the required three meetings between January and March.
The councillors were mandated to discuss BCM programmes at three meetings between January 1 and March 31.
According to BCM policy, each councillor is supposed to convene at least one community meeting a month to give feedback for service delivery and get a sense of what ratepayers want going forward.
But Mtsi’s report, titled “Functionality of Ward Committees”, paints a picture of most of BCM ward councillors being clueless about their constitutional mandate.
Mtsi said 11 of the ward councillors convened two of three meetings, but 17 others managed only one.The remaining 16 did not convene a single meeting during the period under review.
Instead, according to the report, an undisclosed number of ward councillors doctored the minutes of some meetings, trying to pretend they had met the quota.
“There are ward councillors who submit duplicates of previous minutes, changing only the dates while the content is still the same. Such a portfolio of evidence is not recognised. Some councillors confirm the sitting of meetings verbally but they do not submit proof of the meetings held,” Mtsi said.
The Dispatch called all 15 ward councillors. Five answered their phones, and the remaining 10 calls went to voicemail.
Ward 10 councillor Roseline Vitbooi said she had been on study leave but did call meetings. Asked how many meetings she held, Vitbooi said “Yho!” and dropped the phone.
Ward 29 councillor Andries Swart, ward 42 councillor Senduku Maphuka, ward 43 councillor Zukiswa Mankayi and ward 46 councillor Nceba Kilimani all said they had proof that they held meetings.
The report was supposed to have been discussed on Wednesday but was deferred to the next meeting.The report also highlights a picture of councillors who are in defiance of council programmes. Some ward councillors, Mtsi wrote, do not stick to dates stated in the institutional diary and do not invite public participation practitioners to attend rescheduled ward meetings.
“The public participation practitioners are discharged with the responsibility to record, compile, analyse, report, refer and facilitate feedback, and as part of managing the process, the matters are referred to the office of the city manager [Andile Sihlahla] to coordinate with the directors so as to attend to the matters raised,” Mtsi wrote.
It is reported that there were issues raised by ward committee and community members that did not reach the municipality due to public participation officers not being invited to meetings by councillors.
A request to councillors to submit proof of meetings for the period under review was sent on April 6 with the deadline of April 25. The deadline was later extended to May 2.
It is not the first time the functionality of ward committees has come under fire.
In April, the Daily Dispatch reported that the critical role ward committees are meant to play in speeding up service delivery was not working in BCM.
Earlier this year Mtsi told council that a skills audit found that more than half of ward committee members had not reached matric.
The audit found that of the 334 ward committee members assessed, 36 had post-matric qualifications, 112 had matric and 186 did not have a matric.
In his report of the same title in April, Mtsi wrote: “This is important given that the functionality, effectiveness, efficiency and performance of ward committees is constrained by limitations in their levels of education, skills and expertise.”..