Tony Ehrenreich and Xolani Sotashe face disciplinary action for rubbishing the City of Cape Town's budget claims.
|||Cape Town - Tony Ehrenreich and Xolani Sotashe of the ANC face disciplinary action for rubbishing the City of Cape Town’s claims that it has spent almost 93 percent of its capital budget for the previous financial year.
Speaker Dirk Smit said the two councillors had alleged in various media reports that mayor Patricia de Lille and the city “deliberately misled the public on the level of expenditure”, thus bringing the city into disrepute.
He has written to both councillors demanding an explanation for their comments. “After having considered their replies, I will consider whether action should be taken against them.”
But Sotashe said the ANC stood by its view that the city had presented figures that did not reflect its actual spending for the financial year.
“They want to gag the opposition. We have a role to play and we are not going to be intimidated.”
He said the party was prepared to debate the matter in the council, and risk embarrassment if its facts were incorrect.
The ANC would also not shy away from a disciplinary hearing.
“We will not be subjected to this kind of trickery. We stand by our facts and we are ready.”
De Lille and deputy mayor Ian Neilson held a media briefing on Wednesday to highlight the city’s financial success in the 2012/2013 financial year.
They said the city showed a record expenditure of R5.78 billion of its R6.22 billion capital budget, its largest budget to date.
But Sotashe, who is ANC chair in the metro, disputed the figures, saying that it would be nothing short of a miracle if the city had managed to spend almost its entire budget, when two months ago it had spent just 60 percent of its capital budget.
Sotashe said the ANC would study the figures and call a press conference in the next few weeks with its interpretation of how the budget was spent. “We don’t believe in the information which De Lille presented.”
But Smit said on Thursday that he had reviewed the numbers released by the mayor and her executive, and was satisfied that they were an accurate and reliable representation of the city’s capital expenditure.
“In this context I view the comments attributed to councillor Ehrenreich and councillor Sotashe in a serious light as [they] may have brought the city into disrepute and violated the Councillor’s Code of Conduct.”
This is not the first time the ANC has questioned the DA-led city’s budget. In May, the ANC warned that the city would not be able to spend its budget by the end of the financial year and that underspending in several key directorates pointed to a “city in crisis”.
Neilson said the city’s eighth unqualified audit for the previous year, and its highest credit rating available to local government from an international credit agency, attested to the metro’s financial competence.
anel.lewis@inl.co.za
Cape Argus