Thabazimbi council has two mayors and two speakers as parties blame each other for stalled services
Five years after the 2021 local government elections produced a hung council, two of the six parties in the chamber say residents are paying for a fight that has never been settled.
Two of the six parties sitting in the Thabazimbi council in Limpopo say the municipality is running two mayors and two speakers at the same time, and that the standoff is costing residents the services they pay for.
The council has had no outright majority since the 2021 local government elections, and the parties in the chamber have never settled on a stable arrangement to run it. That is the arrangement the DA and the EFF say has now produced parallel leadership.
Two sets of leadership
DA councillor Estie Fourie and EFF councillor Sello Mohutsiwa both told SABC News that the political divisions have again produced competing structures inside the council.
Fourie said the municipality is still hung, and that it currently has two mayors and two speakers. She said the previous speaker was suspended by his own party, the Labour Party, and that the council sittings held in June and July went ahead and elected a new mayor and a new speaker.
“Two Mayors, two speakers, so there was a lot of chaos,” she said.
She said the council was placed under Section 139(1)(c) of the Constitution, the provision that allows a provincial executive to intervene in a municipality that cannot fulfil its executive obligations, and that by-elections followed. The EFF returned to the council after those by-elections, and Fourie said the municipality cannot be dissolved twice.
The municipality’s account
Thabazimbi mayoral spokesperson Joshua Motsomane gave a different account of how the council is being run. He said the municipality is performing well despite the political stalemate.
“Administratively we don’t have issues,” Motsomane said. He said the municipality has a municipal manager and a management team in place.
On the question of two mayors, Motsomane said only one mayor has been sworn in, or inaugurated, as mayor. He said the political difficulty is that the municipality is heading for an election, and that some councillors may not return, either because they do not want to or because their parties will not put them forward.
What a hung council costs
A hung council is not unusual in South African local government. What matters for a household in Thabazimbi is what it does to the things a municipality is supposed to deliver: water, electricity, refuse collection, roads, and the processing of building plans and business licences.
Where a council cannot agree on who runs it, the decisions that authorise spending and sign off on service contracts slow down or stop, and the officials who remain in place can only work within the budget and the mandates the council has already approved. That is the cost the DA and the EFF are pointing at when they say service delivery is stalling.
The municipality’s own position is that the administration is functioning and that the political contest is a separate matter. Both claims can be tested against the same record: the council’s resolutions, its budget, and what residents in Thabazimbi actually receive.
The parties in the chamber
The council is made up of six parties, and no single one of them holds enough seats to govern alone. That is the arithmetic that produced the deadlock in the first place, and it is the arithmetic that any settlement has to work around.
Section 139 interventions are not a permanent fix. They are a temporary measure, and the Constitution expects a municipality to return to normal functioning once the intervention ends. Thabazimbi has now been through that cycle and come back to a council that still cannot agree on its own leadership.
The provincial government in Limpopo, which is the authority that can intervene under Section 139, has not been quoted in the reporting on the current standoff, and the cooperative governance department in Polokwane is the body that would have to act if the council cannot resolve the matter itself.
What happens next
The council remains hung, and the parties in it remain divided on who leads it. The next scheduled step is the local government election, which is the point at which voters in Thabazimbi get to settle the arithmetic that the parties have not been able to settle among themselves.
Until then, the municipality says its administration is working and the DA and the EFF say the political fight is holding services back. The residents of Thabazimbi are the ones who will know which account is true.
Source: SABC News, Infighting paralyses hung Thabazimbi municipality
