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The Democratic Alliance (DA) has reported the Speaker of Sol Plaatje municipality, Nomazizi Maputle, to the Speaker’s Forum after she today cancelled an important council meeting to go and babysit officials attending to a sewerage issue in Roodepan.

Today’s council meeting was a continuation from last week to discuss the electricity tariffs of which annual increases have already been implemented, despite not yet having passed before Council. Proposed increases have also not yet been approved by NERSA.

This issue affects the whole of Kimberley and should not be neglected because the Speaker has just woken up to a longstanding crisis in an ANC ward, that was already reported to Sol Plaatje in May by DA councillor, Heinrich Pieterse and for years before that by DA councillor Eleanor Badenhorst.

The decision by the Speaker, the Mayor and the entire mayoral committee to show up to the Council meeting in overalls is disingenuous. It is not their responsibility to physically attend to sewage leaks. It is also not their responsibility to oversee the officials who have been sent to the site to attend to the sewerage matter. If they are of the view that the officials do not work when they are not there to oversee them, then they need to implement a form of consequence management to ensure that ill-disciplined officials are held accountable.

Sol Plaatje has so much broken infrastructure that if the Speaker wants to personally go and oversee the repair of all service delivery at the cost of council meetings, then none will ever take place.

The DA has written to the Speaker’s Forum to report her. She has a duty to see that council meetings take place, are duly called by her and are properly constituted. This is not the first time she has flouted the Standing Orders and it is time that we nip any further bad behaviour in the bud.

Afterall, for a municipality to function properly, council must function properly.

Issued by Elize Niemann, Cllr - Sol Plaatje Municipality