Why AIM supports motion to remove Bay mayor Van Niekerk

The residents of Nelson Mandela Bay have long suffered under poor leadership in the council.

This has impacted negatively on the delivery of services to the population and the businesses that create jobs for our people.

The mayor, Gary van Niekerk, exemplifies such poor leadership an incompetent man who lurches from one personal legal controversy to another while embroiled in fraud and corruption allegations.

It is unconscionable that a metro named after [late former] president [Nelson] Mandela should be led by such an unworthy individual.

In February last year, Van Niekerk said he had an energy expert from Stellenbosch University who had a plan to end load-shedding in the metro in two weeks.

Where is that plan today, almost a year later? Residents and businesses of Nelson Mandela Bay are still suffering under load-shedding and Van Niekerk has moved on to make new pie-in-the-sky promises.

In December, he made a bold public commitment that his administration would fix all potholes in the metro by Christmas Eve.

A manager who has ever run any small business would never make such a promise without a comprehensive implementation plan in place.

But obviously not our incompetent mayor who did not even bother to consult the responsible municipal directorate or its political head before rushing to the media with his new empty promise.

How could he not have known that service providers shut down their operations during the festive season and many employees in the municipality’s roads directorate would be on leave? Who was going to do the work?

Then our incompetent mayor flies himself First Class to China in violation of government regulations and then turns around and blames his subordinates it was their decision, they made me do it, he says.

Which leader worth his salt blames people that report to him after violating the very municipal regulations he’s supposed to be a custodian of?

Would such a lame excuse pass muster if the National Treasury were to hold him to account for the illegal expenditure of taxpayers’ money?

Official overseas travel on government-to-government business is not a get-up-andgo trip. It is supposed to be planned meticulously in advance.

But our bumbling mayor managed to leave Nelson Mandela Bay without the air ticket for the international leg of the trip.

There were posts on social media that he was stranded at the airport in Johannesburg because the municipality had failed to pay the travel agent.

What level of incompetence is that? How much harm does that do to the business image of the Nelson Mandela Bay metro?

It will also be remembered that the council is led by a mayor who has been expelled by his own political party.

Among other things, he is accused of fraudulently changing the party’s name to try to cling to power. The matter is before the high court.

It is telling that this is not the first time Van Niekerk has been expelled by his party.

The obvious question residents must have on their minds is how is he a fit and proper person to be mayor of Nelson Mandela Bay when his own party does not want him?

His legal woes don’t end there.

He is also under investigation by the Hawks for allegedly fraudulently presenting himself to a legal firm as speaker of council after he had been removed from the position, causing the council to incur a bill of more than R500,000 for unauthorised legal services.

Even if he was acting as speaker (which he was not), as a politician he had no authority in law to bypass the supply chain department to give direct instructions to service providers to render unapproved services to the municipality.

One would have expected that there would be someone in his political circle who is remotely familiar with the Municipal

Finance Management Act which expressly forbids such action.

Given that we are now saddled with such a patently unworthy leader it is time for council to pause and take stock of the fact that we are failing the people of Nelson Mandela Bay by keeping such a compromised individual in the mayor’s office.

It is time to elect an upright and competent leader with moral rectitude to take our metro forward.

That is why as the Abantu Integrity Movement we support the motion of no confidence by the GOOD party which will be tabled at the next council meeting.

Of course, Van Niekerk’s sponsors, the ANC and EFF, continue to back him to the hilt to the point of trying to sabotage the council’s ethics committee which is supposed to be investigating him but has had seven abortive meetings, thanks to their stalling tactics.

These two parties must remind themselves that we are in an election year.

The voters of Nelson Mandela Bay will be wondering what it is that they stand to gain by propping up such a deeply flawed mayor.

Why are they on the side of incompetence by an individual who is facing a litany of problems?

They might just pay a price for it at the polls.