GOOD Statement by Sandra Dickson, GOOD City of Cape Town Councillor:
The City of Cape Town’s Mayoral Committee is not some large, faceless structure.
It is the Mayor’s hand-picked executive team.
There are only about 11 portfolio Mayco members running the City’s most powerful departments.
So when, over the past few years, Cape Town has seen:
- a former Human Settlements Mayco member removed after a police raid linked to tender-fraud allegations
- an Urban Waste Mayco member publicly called out over the collapse of waste services
- two sitting Mayco members’ offices raided in a tender-fraud investigation
- and now the Finance Mayco member’s residence searched in a serious corruption investigation
then GOOD believes residents are entitled to ask:
What exactly is going on inside the Mayor’s inner circle?
Let us be clear:
GOOD is not saying anyone is guilty before a court has made a finding.
But residents are not fools either.
Police do not arrive unannounced, execute search-and-seizure warrants, and seize phones and laptops because they are having a friendly information session.
At minimum, it means investigators believed evidence relevant to a serious investigation may be found there.
And that is a very different thing from casually calling it “information gathering”.
The Mayor’s response is always carefully worded:
“I have not been informed of direct wrongdoing.”
“We support the investigation.”
“We must wait for the facts.”
That may be legally cautious, but it is politically inadequate.
Cape Town residents are being asked to pay more and more every year. They are told this City is clean, efficient, transparent and well governed.
But clean governance cannot only mean a clean audit while police keep arriving at City-linked offices, homes, contracts and officials.
GOOD believes the Mayor must stop managing the optics and start answering the governance question:
Why are so many serious clouds gathering around such a small executive team?
The obvious conclusion is this:
The Mayor’s Mayco is no longer projecting confidence. It is projecting crisis management.
And until the Mayor applies one consistent standard to all Mayco members, not one standard for political allies and another for everyone else, residents have every right to question whether Cape Town’s “clean governance” image is beginning to crack.
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Voodoo Queen
Finland: You have two cows. They are more likely than your entire country to commit a crime.
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