The spirited ongoing attempts to remove incumbent City of Tshwane Mayor Cilliers Brink should be attributed to the tender system and reckless clauses in our Constitution which make provision for random motions of no confidence.
This careless and irresponsible desire to get rid of those in leadership positions at the drop of a hat reminds me of marauding sea robbers (pirates) like John Silver in the world-acclaimed 1883 novel Treasure Island, written by Robert Louis Stevenson.
In the novel, the buccaneers are a motley crew as they share no common values except a common purpose to loot everything, they can lay their hands on and kill anyone who stands in their way to amass ill-gotten wealth.
And their favorite pastime when not engaging in actual looting and killing perceived enemies is to change or vote out the ship’s captain every now and then with the hope that this would put them in close proximity to a larger share of the soon-to-be-looted wealth than their fellow bandits.
Now the ANC has made it clear via its Regional Secretary George Matjila that one of the reasons for its desire to chase Brink out of office is that he has terminated a municipal waste removal tender that has been awarded to a black township tenderpreneur in the City of Tshwane.
The said tender had apparently been awarded to the tenderpreneur since the dawn of democracy some thirty years ago and was apparently envisaged to be an “evergreen” contract.
Needless to say, an evergreen contract is a contract that runs on forever and ever Amen despite lacklustre performance by the contractor.
If the tender system was not in existence, then the said tenderpreneur whose identity Matjila has told Tshwane Talks that he doesn’t know, would not have been awarded the tender in the first place and then have it taken away from him in the second place.
And the ANC wouldn’t be be harbouring anger against Brink and there would be relatively peace in the City of Tshwane.
ActionSA, which is also baying for Brink’s blood, is on record as saying lack of service delivery in Tshwane townships and an “abusive relationship” with the DA are the reasons for its call for a motion of no confidence in him.
But only last month ActionSA councillors working in Brink’s mayoral committee were quoted as saying they were working in terms of service delivery and were succeeding in rooting out corruption in the City of Tshwane.
Were these councillors telling lies?
Now if random motions of no confidence were not the norm, then ActionSA wouldn’t be running amok seeking revenge for old political wounds because there would not be easy mechanisms to settle past gripes.
The party would stay put in the coalition and there would be relative stability in the City of Tshwane.
Now whether the reasons cited by the ANC and ActionSA are genuine or not is not for me to decide.
My gripe in this whole motion of no confidence matter is that such motions are encouraged by reckless clauses in our Constitution, which allow individuals to use their political parties to get rid of those that they personally happen to detest.
These reckless motion of no confidence clauses in our Constitution do not ask for reasons for the removal of the incumbent mayor, but rather recommend that one may only bring a vote of no confidence three months after the previous one.
This is more like telling an abusive partner in a relationship that they must wait for at least three months before abusing their partner again, instead of telling the abusive partner to refrain from the nonsense that they are doing forever.
My foot, motions of no confidence are destructive and abusive to the residents of Tshwane and before they are carried out those who sponsor them must provide tangible reasons to the residents for the purpose of scrutiny and robust debate.
Now let me digress a bit and hasten to point out that the motion of no confidence practice is as toxic as the nonsensical, so-called ” point of order” phenomenon which the EFF’s Dr Mbuyiseni Ndlozi is so fond of, only for him to rise and point out how so and so in Parliament is shabbily dressed, much to the laughter of his fellow EFF members.
Now focusing on the tender system, which has driven the ANC in Tshwane to go to great lengths to remove Brink, my take is that this system should be abolished forthwith not only in Tshwane but in South Africa as a whole.
This as the corruption that has dogged Eskom and other state-owned institutions was enabled by the selfsame tender system.
The extortion mafia also thrive due to the tender system.
This as the mafias victimise and extort money mostly from those who have been awarded tenders.
And if we are going to continue relying on commissions of inquiry and never-ending court cases to root out corruption in this country, then we would be akin to a person who frantically tries to draw water from a tap using a bottomless bucket.
The way some South African politics are “married” to the tender system is similar to the way some citizens in the United States of America are “married” to the culture of individuals carrying guns in public, even though the gun-carrying culture has resulted in innocent citizens of that country being shot and killed en masse.
The tender system, like the gun-carrying culture in the USA, is a violent concept as it brings about what English philosopher Thomas Hobbes has turned “the state of nature,” whereby human faculty is reduced to a level equal to that of animals.
Under such circumstances, whereby might shall rule, the proverbial law of the jungle rules the roost and survival of the fittest becomes the norm.
I rest my case!