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·      Dr Moeketsi Mosola’s tenure at the city was topsy-turvy as he fought against corruption and his name being dragged into the mud ·      Tshwane Metro was a crime scene ·      Coalition government agreements must be in place and certified by the courts

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Sizwe sama Yende

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Dr Moeketsi Mosola did not take long to accede when he was headhunted from academia to be City of Tshwane manager in 2017.

Mosola had qualms at first and rejected the offer outright, but upon mulling over it a few days, he changed his mind and took up the challenge to manage the country’s administrative capital city.

Little did he know that he was walking right into the jaws of a crocodile. The crocodile being the leading DA that had snatched power from the ANC after the 2016 local government elections.

In his recently-published memoir – The Nation’s Capital: How a failed coalition brought Tshwane to the brink – Mosola writes: “When I walked into Tshwane House on my first day as City Manager, I was under no illusions. I knew the honeymoon would be short if it even existed at all. But I believed, perhaps naively, that if one served with integrity, transparency, and a relentless focus on service delivery, even the most hardened political opponents would come to respect the work.”

At that watershed period in the country’s politics, Tshwane and two other Gauteng metropolitan councils – the City of Johannesburg and the City of Ekurhuleni – as well as the Nelson Mandela Bay in the Eastern Cape had come out of the elections without an outright winner.

The ANC’s dominance had dwindled drastically and pushed it to opposition benches for the first time since democracy in 1994, leaving new and smaller parties such as the EFF being kingmakers.

“Tshwane was a crime scene when I got there,” Mosola told The People’s Eye Podcast in an exclusive this week.

 “Tshwane,” he further explained, “was a crime scene because there were multi-billion-rand contracts that were illegally issued, which I challenged successfully.”

Mosola ripped into the DA’s double standards on cadre deployment, corruption, and former Tshwane Metro mayor Solly Msimanga’s indecisiveness and how he was a puppet.

“Solly never took any decisions in the city. He was a puppet. After we talk in our meetings he would go and report back to his masters. They would say yes or no, and he would come back embarrassed. The DA does not trust black people. They make sure they surround them with white advisors. Solly was well-known that he had no backbone and was a stooge,” he said.

Mosola’s memoir dives into the intricacies of coalition governments. Having been in the thick of things in Tshwane, Mosola also offers sound advice on how coalitions need to be managed.

South Africa is undoubtedly moving in the direction where coalition governments will spread in many parts of the country. Since 2016, the number of hung municipalities has increased to 70 as the ANC loses grip even in some of its traditional strongholds in many provinces.

Mosola said that the DA and EFF did not have a binding agreement on paper to govern Tshwane. It was a gentlemen’s agreement, Mosola said.

He believes that courts must be central in the signing of coalition agreements.

“I'm saying that there must be a coalition legislation that makes it a requirement that there must be a written agreement between political parties. That agreement must be certified by court, making it a legal document, so that if there is a dispute, it's not what's happening now where people suffer when the two bulls are fighting,” Mosola said.

“They can go to the judge and the judge says that, well, guys, we agree with this. Well, you have failed to do this. This is what happens. And then services move forward. You see what I mean? The only way that they can cancel that agreement, it must be sanctioned by the court,” Mosola added.

Mosola’s suggestion coincides with work that has already started in Parliament after the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs proposed the Local Government: Municipal Structures Amendment Bill.

Mosola said that the EFF had a dilemma in Tshwane because it was, on the one hand, chairing all political committees and, on the other, taking executive decisions with the DA. That double role straddling the executive and oversight undermined democracy, he said.  

“Our democracy is a system of check and balance. That's why we have the judiciary, we have the executive, and we have the legislature. The theory of all that is that you cannot be in the legislature and be in the executive. That is why when the president, after he is elected as the president, stops becoming a member of parliament,” Mosola said.

The EFF, he said, was both the referee and the player. “I am proposing in my book that we need to come up with a coalition legislation. So, if EFF is going to be in coalition with the DA in Tshwane, they cannot be in the legislature.”