When Gauteng Cooperative Governance MEC Lebogang Maile unlawfully placed the City of Tshwane under administration he deployed 10 administrators to govern the city. This was over six months ago.

Since then four of these administrators have resigned from the City and out of the remaining six only three of those who remain are actually working.

Lesedi Mere is currently nowhere to be seen in the City of Tshwane and despite continuing to receive his exorbitant salary, he seems to have abandoned his responsibilities and portfolio.

The only remaining working administrators are Gilberto Martins, Rianda Kruger and Lefadi Makibinyane who have effectively taken on all of the work in the city.

Mmaseabata Mutlaneng who was deployed with them is the acting city manager.

While Mpho Nawa as head administrator seems to rather outsource all his decisions to the ANC-led provincial government.

MEC Maile has forgotten about Tshwane, unwilling to take responsibility for the mess he has created in the city, he is casually watching as the people he deployed to the city abandon their duties.

The City of Tshwane has a population of about 3.3 million, is the third largest metropolitan city by geographic size in the world, and requires a diverse set of skills to manage and administer it.

It is supposed to be led by an executive mayor, ten members of the mayoral committee, the speaker of council, the chief whip and 16 chairpersons of section 79 oversight committees.

This political leadership team is tasked with driving basic service delivery, providing oversight on spending and projects and ensuring that residents are represented locally through a responsive government.

Instead, all of these responsibilities are sitting with a dwindling team of unlawfully deployed and illegal ANC administrators who are simply not capable of directing all the operations.

This is clearly compromising the City’s efficiency and basic service delivery.

Maile has given up filling the vacancies created by the administrators who have vacated the city.

In doing so he has created a growing leadership crisis in the City of Tshwane.

Issued by DA