Pretoria - The multiparty coalition partners in Tshwane were on Friday left with egg on their faces after they failed to pass a draft adjustment budget for 2022/2023 because they were short of one vote to achieve their goal.
This was during the continuation of a special council sitting hosted at Tshwane House after a meeting on Thursday was adjourned.
The coalition partners had banked on a sole Good political party councillor Sarah Mabotja to vote in favour of the budget, but she turned her back on them.
At least 108 votes were required to pass the adjustment budget, but the coalition made up of DA, ActionSA, FF-plus, IFP and ACDP only had 107.
One of the DA councillors Francois Bekker resigned recently and yesterday an FF-Plus councillor Grandi Theunissen was absent due to illness.
Mabotja said: “There has been an extensive engagement between the coalition and the Good party for our vote.”
She said her party wanted the coalition to include in the adjustment budget issues raised in an adverse audit report issued by the Auditor-General early this year in return for its vote.
She said the party had also learnt that the coalition failed to attach a quality certificate to the report, saying it needed to be obtained before the budget tabling.
“In this budget there is nothing really that addresses the issue of townships,” she said.
Stinging criticisms against the budget were also made by the ANC and EFF, which believed it put service delivery in townships on the back burner while prioritising affluent areas.
Both parties registered dissenting votes to the budget.
The ANC’s France Boshielo said the adjustment budget was another attack on the poor residents in townships.
“This municipality relies on deviation which must be the last resort in terms of the service delivery roll-out. We are dealing with the roll-over of unspent grants which is a direct result of an administration that is clueless on issues of governance,” he said.
He said the budget was unrealistic and that there was no plan on the part of the DA to fix the city’s shambolic finances.
EFF regional leader Obakeng Ramabodu shared sentiments that people in townships were being neglected in terms of provision of services and that the budget didn’t give out hope for them.
“In Tshwane we have close to over 200 informal settlements yet on the adjustments the city is reallocating the budget from human settlements while our people in ward 22 Ga-Tsebe and Dunusa are living in squatter camps and a bad environment,” he said.
He said the EFF calls for the formalisation of the informal settlements and to ensure that people have access to basic services such as water, electricity and sanitation.
“It is public knowledge that the DA coalition has for years neglected the poor communities of the country and focused on the minority capitalist class,” Ramabodu said.
Finance MMC Peter Sutton explained that the adjustment budget was a budget that was approved last year.
The city’s financial situation showed that it had failed to collect revenues in line with its last year projections.
Sutton said: “That is the major problem that we face in the city at the moment. We are not collecting. We are not increasing our revenue base. And that puts severe pressure on all aspects of the liquidity and our liquidity ratio is in the negative.”
He agreed that the city’s budget was unfunded but said the National Treasury had given the municipality a go-ahead to approve its adjustment budget.
He, however, said the Treasury had given the city three years to fix its financial situation in order to have a funded budget.
He shot down claims earlier made by councillors Lex Middelberg from Republican Conference of Tshwane and Mabotja that there had been increased tariffs that were not declared in the adjustment budget.
“What we can’t do in the adjustment budget is to increase tariffs. We can’t increase tariffs. There are no tariff increases in this budget,” he said.
Sutton also said the quality certificate was not a prerequisite for passing of the budget, but that it was signed by the city manager after budget approval and sent to the Treasury.
Pretoria News