By Glenn Hollands

Western Cape MEC for Local Government Richard Dyantyi has announced his intention to change the Cape Town Metro municipality from a mayoral executive type to an executive committee type. This would significantly diminish the powers of DA executive mayor Helen Zille and her mayoral committee and force the DA to share executive powers in an executive committee with the ANC and smaller minority parties. Currently, most of the country’s metropolitan and district municipalities and some larger local municipalities operate as executive mayor systems. The basic rationale being that executive mayor type councils allow for leadership and accountability to be consolidated into the person of the mayor and a cabinet-like committee appointed by them. The system is set out within the Municipal Structures Act and contains an unprecedented concentration of power compared to previous municipal systems which required collective exercise of executive authority.

Although the system only became possible after the 2000 elections, its somewhat weakly developed rationale lies in the Local Government White Paper. The White Paper suggested that small executives were more efficient by virtue of their ability to “act more quickly, efficiently and responsively than a large legislature” and that the independence of the legislature (council as a whole) could be retained and could effectively “call both the executive and administration to account…”  The value of accountable ‘buck stops here’ leadership is a clear motivation and the White Paper went on to suggest that, “ An individual executive mayor may be an appropriate form of political leadership for many councils. It has the advantage of ‘giving a face’ to local government, and creating a strong focal point for local politics”. Helen Zille, often regarded as abrasive and divisive, is nonetheless an ideal  executive type mayor in that she has never shied away from being held accountable – whether Cape Town needs such a leader is more debatable.

In practice, the mayoral executive municipalities seldom retained this balance between executive and legislative authority and unpublished NGO research indicates that both opposition councillors and ruling party back-benchers feel marginalised by the operation of mayoral committees. The role of council becomes peripheral under mayoral committees which invariably wield a high degree of decision-making power as delegated to them by the dominant party on council. Furthermore, conflict within Buffalo City between the executive mayor and the city manager during 2005 illustrated that the executive mayor system does not prevent disruption caused by a divided council. Unlike executive committee systems, mayoral committees are not legally obliged to represent parties and interests proportionally within the municipal council as a whole. Mayoral committees are free to become single party decision-making structures unencumbered by the nagging voice of the opposition, thus municipalities avoid the irritating process of debate and contention that characterises local democracy.

From Dyanti’s public statements it would appear that the reason for adjusting the Cape metro type (apart from vague allusions to unity building for the 2010 World Cup) is the fact that he can. Certainly Dyantyi’s legal right to change the type of a municipality within his province is clearly set out in section 16 of the Municipal Structures Act viz. an MEC “may amend a section 12 notice - to change the municipality from its existing type to another type…” What this Act and other legislation do not specify is under what circumstances an MEC should act in this manner nor the criteria that should be applied in deciding whether a municipality should be a collective or mayoral executive type. Without these guidelines and criteria, provincial intervention in metropolitan municipalities to change their status will justifiably be seen as arbitrary and capricious.

Given the ANC’s obvious resentment at having to concede by a tiny margin one of the country’s key metro areas to the DA, it is hardly surprising that Dyantyi is perceived by many to have acted in the narrow interests of his party rather than those of the Cape Town public. Dyanti has cited the need for “common purpose and unity” in the metro, however, ANC MECs have never stripped away executive mayor status from ANC controlled metros no matter how divisive and poorly governed they have become. In fact, after the December 2000 elections a number of small municipalities who were not eligible to become executive mayor types, ‘erroneously’ adopted this system. In the case of Ndlambe in the Eastern Cape, it took many months and evidence of irregular payments to councillors before the MEC finally stepped in to correct matters.

In the Cape metro battle, however, the DA has shown inconsistency on the issue of executive mayors. Initially the DA pledged to avoid a concentration of power in the mayoral committee, but later opted for this type when it became apparent that an executive committee system would leave it with a weak hand on executive power. The ANC may thus have succeeded in simply rubbing the DA’s political nose in its own over-principled rhetoric.

References
1. Municipal Structures Act
2. Municipal Systems Act
3. White Paper on Local Government
4. www.sabcnews.com 20/09/2006
5. www.iol.co.za 20/09/2006
6. Afesis-corplan 2005, The Impact of the Mayoral Executive System on Local Government Decision Making: Lessons from a Eastern Cape Category B Municipality June 2005 (unpublished)

The Local Government Transformer, Vol 12 No5. Oct/Nov 2006