Bitou Municipal Manager suspended as deployed staff try to cover up maladministration

Attempts by municipal officials in Plettenberg Bay's Bitou Municipality to stop cooperating with the newly elected DA leadership team demonstrate the dangers of political deployments.

An attempt to legally justify the non-cooperation has collapsed after DA mayor Memory Booysen and Speaker Johan Brummer demonstrated the bid had no foundation. The municipal manager has now been suspended and has left the council building. This is the latest bid by ANC-deployed council officials to cover up the actions of the previous ANC administration and to cripple the council's operations ahead of a court bid to overturn the ruling DA-COPE coalition.

Next month a court will hear a further bid by the Shilowa faction of COPE to overturn the election of a Lekota-aligned councillor who has provided the DA with a one-seat majority in the newly elected Bitou council. If the Shilowa faction wins I believe it will return control of the council to the ANC and the long dark night of dodgy financial management will continue. But as the IEC has already pronounced on this issue I believe Shilowa's court bid will fail.

Bitou has been bankrupted by years of ANC misrule. Democracy has produced a change of leadership and now key municipal staff who were deployed there by the ANC are trying to hide what has gone on before. Having visited and conferred with the DA team I believe that every cover-up attempt only makes them more determined to uncover irregularities and put the municipality back on a sound footing.

The lack of professionalism shown by some staff members demonstrates again why local government in South Africa is in such a crisis. If people are appointed to jobs for political rather than professional reasons, they will not run a professional administration. Although the ANC has made some cosmetic changes to cadre deployment, it still dominates the landscape of municipal government. Until South Africans recognise that a professional administration and cadre deployment are mutually exclusive then municipal government under the ANC is doomed to failure.

Statement issued by James Lorimer MP, DA Shadow Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, July 17 2011

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