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Eight new ANC councilors sworn in at Mkhondo Local Municipality

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Eight new African national Congress (ANC) councillors have been sworn in at the Mkhondo Local Municipality in Mpumalanga. They were elected during the by-elections in December.

The positions became vacant after the ANC expelled party members who voted with the small political parties to elect the mayor, Mthokozisi Simelane who is an independent candidate, African Transformation Movement’s (ATM) Mduduzi Dlamini as the Speaker and Siphesihle Mkhwanazi of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) as the Chief whip.

The ANC members sworn in as new councillors at the Mkhondo Municipality in Piet Retief, replace the party members who were expelled by the ANC last year.

Among the expelled members is the former Mayor Vusi Motha.

Motha and the other former ANC members eventually joined the EFF before the by-elections were held in December.

The ANC says their next step is to remove the mayor through a vote of no confidence.

“From now on we are preparing to constitute the municipality. The ANC is now having 18 councilors. As you know three have resigned. We are still going to have three by-elections, ward 1, 2 and 19. But of course we are going to work with the opposition parties to put a vote of no-confidence to the mayor who has stolen our municipality and then we shall elect our own executive mayor who is Ngelosi Ndlovu. Then she will have an opportunity to constitute the mayoral committee which will then have an opportunity now to start to focus on the issues of service delivery,” says ANC secretary Muzi Chirwa

Failure of service delivery

The Mkhondo Local Municipality is among the municipalities accused of failing to deliver services. Almost all roads in this municipality are riddled with potholes.

The municipality is also struggling to settle its Eskom debt.

The residents of Mkhondo are concerned that they spend many hours without electricity due to Eskom’s rolling blackouts and the municipal load reduction, sometimes implemented in succession.

“At Mkhondo we don’t have water, electricity and proper roads. There are potholes everywhere and there are no job opportunities,” says one of the resident.

“We spend several hours without electricity. The roads are very bad especially at the location,” says another resident.

Analysts believes that the Mkhondo residents would still have to wait a little longer before they could see better service deliver.

“But still the issue of the elections, the newly reconfigured council of Mkhondo Municipality is going to take time to settle. To begin to say we are now able to affect service delivery to the community. In this whole process, my observation is that the most sectors in this political and economic sphere which is suffering are the voters themselves in terms of impacting negatively on service delivery,” explains independent analyst Solly Masilela.

Attempts for a comment from the Executive Mayor Mthokozisi Simelane were unsuccessful.

Residents of Mkhondo march over electricity and water outages, among others 6 July 2022:

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