Central SA
MPs fuming because of disrespectful Mangaung officials─── LUCKY NKUYANE 15:27 Fri, 01 Apr 2022
Members of opposition parties were left fuming at the troubled Mangaung Metro Municipality's officials during the National Council of Provinces' sitting on Friday at the Free State Legislature.
The Freedom Front Plus (FF Plus) Member of Parliament (MP), Adriaan Petrus de Bruyn, was furious with the metro after its officials failed to attend the site visits at two water treatment plants in Wepener and Dewetsdorp this week.
“As we all know, the state of Mangaung is in chaos financially and with regards to service delivery. And as I've said earlier, I feel it’s arrogant of Mangaung to not even show up to the site visits or, even today where they came late. It just shows the arrogance. It shows that they have no political will to solve these problems,” he adds.
He told the Free State's permanent delegate to the NCOP, Itumeleng Ntsube, who was chairing the oversight visits, that harsh measures should be taken against the troubled Metro.
The DA MP, George Michalakis, says the Metro has shown serious disrespect to the committee and must be dealt with.
"We do these oversights quite often and some of the things we saw were not surprising. We know the state of these municipalities in the province, but what we are disappointed with, is that Mangaung had a complete disregard for Parliament. They came to apologise and said it won’t happen again, but quite frankly, this is the second time it's happening. They disrespected Parliament last week as well, so that’s quite concerning,” he adds.
Ntsube had quite strong words for the Metro. He labelled the metro as an institution that thinks it’s some sort of superman municipality. Ntsube said this was not the first time the Metro disrespected the NCOP. He says in 2020, the metro did the same as it did this year.
Following the oversight visits at different municipalities, to especially assess the state of the water treatment plants, amongst others, certain recommendations were made regarding municipalities like the Trompsburg-based Kopanong Local Municipality.
With regard to this cash-strapped municipality, the NCOP has recommended that Kopanong must provide a written report on projects which have been prioritised for the current financial year across all nine towns.
The NCOP said the municipality must ensure that it has full control of the borehole system before entering into a new Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the Bloem Water board.
