Mangaung pulls 38 municipal jobs off the table until the new council sits
The Free State metro advertised the posts, ran the interviews and then deferred the final appointments, as Parliament's oversight committee asked why the vacancies were being filled on the eve of an election.
Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality has deferred the final appointments to 38 advertised posts, several of them managerial, until the incoming council is constituted, after Parliament’s cooperative governance committee and an opposition MP questioned why the posts were being filled on the eve of a change of administration.
The Free State metro advertised the positions and ran the recruitment process within the applicable laws, according to its acting general manager for communication, Nicolette Maysiels. The council then decided to hold the appointments back.
“This decision was guided by the principle of fairness and the need to ensure that the incoming council is afforded the opportunity to assume its responsibilities without being prejudiced by appointments finalised immediately before the transition to a new council term,” Maysiels said.
South Africans vote for new municipal councils on Wednesday, 4 November. As IOL reported on 3 November, the Cogta portfolio committee had picked up that a number of municipalities were filling vacancies just before the change of administration.
Committee chairperson Dr Zweli Mkhize put the question in terms of who carries the consequences. “In principle, the question is, can you burden an incoming administration with officials who were selected by the outgoing team?” he said.
Mkhize said there was no law that appeared to stop a municipality from filling vacancies close to an election, but that the process should be transparent and justified. He asked why posts had stood empty for years only for recruitment to accelerate shortly before a new council takes office.
“We are not advocating that you should leave all vacant posts for the new administration to fill in, but we are saying we need to demonstrate that it was because they were vacant, and it was because, by the time by which they should have been advertised, that you actually went and did that advertisement,” he said.
EFF MP Carl Niehaus had earlier asked Cogta Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa in Parliament whether he was aware of alleged last-minute mass appointments of senior officials in Mangaung and whether they complied with the law. Niehaus told IOL he believed the outgoing administration was trying to “rule from the grave”, leaving a new council with appointments it could not easily change. “That is for me the bottom line. For them to rush it through now is a demonstration of bad faith,” he said.
Hlabisa’s written reply set out the legal position. Municipal councils make these appointments and must submit prescribed reports to the provincial MEC for local government for compliance assessment and onward reporting to the minister. The minister said he had not been formally informed of the alleged mass appointments in Mangaung, and that the law did not require his prior concurrence or approval for municipal staff appointments.
He said his department was engaging the Free State provincial department responsible for local government to verify the allegations and establish the facts, and that allegations of possible cadre deployment, electioneering through the state or attempts to bind an incoming council had not been established.
Maysiels said the recruitment drive answered concerns the Auditor-General had raised about the municipality’s high vacancy rate and sustained overtime expenditure over the past decade. Deferring the appointments, she said, did not invalidate the process already run. “The process will be considered for finalisation after the new council has been constituted, subject to the applicable legislation, recruitment policies and procedures.”
The timing question has a wider backdrop. Hlabisa told the Cogta committee last month that legislation provides for a municipal manager’s contract to overlap by one year between administrations, so that the manager can carry the transition from the old council to the new one. “There is no municipal manager who is employed more than a year after the elections, and that is determined by the law,” he said.
For residents of Mangaung, the practical effect of the deferral is that the posts stay open a while longer. The recruitment files exist. The decision on who fills them now waits for the council that the 4 November election produces.
