Today, the guesswork surrounding the future of Mathabeng’s executive mayor, the official ruling that he step aside, and who will be appointed as the acting mayor will hopefully be clarified.
At 12:00, the ANC has called for a special caucus in preparation for the special council meeting that will take place at 15:00.
Mayor Thanduxolo Khalipha’s step-aside, his self-imposed leave of absence, his own appointment of an acting mayor, and then the ANC’s choice of an acting mayor are expected to be on the agenda.
Until such time there are two acting mayors.
The big question is, who is going to win? The disenfranchised Khalipha, or the voice of the ruling party to whom Khalipha should ultimately answer to?
It is widely understood that the ANC’s choice for acting mayor is the current member of the mayoral committee (MMC) for finance, Hlobohang Mokhomo.
In the interim, the residents of Matjhabeng are being held to ransom with poor service delivery issues. For virtually six days, portions of St Helena and Bedelia were without electricity when the transformer was sabotaged.
Then on Tuesday, 13 August, during Eskom’s planned maintenance outage, water supply to these areas was also affected, which caused a furore.
Refuse has not been collected for more than six weeks, and burst pipes flood the city’s streets.
Residents on the different WhatsApp groups are fed-up. One wrote: “This thing of cable theft, if the mayor hired the people with experience in the security cluster, not nepotism, and people from Eastern Cape not knowing to speak the language of Matjhabeng or Free State in general, we would not experience this cable theft.”
