Speaker of Tshwane council Mncedi Ndzwanana was forced to adjourn council meeting on Thursday after it descended into chaos over Mayor Cilliers Brink's comment likening the ANC in power to “a hard-drinking person in charge of a bottle store”.
The ANC demanded that Brink withdraw his public utterance made during a television interview this week, but he refused to succumb to pressure to do so.
The ANC councillors vowed to prevent the mayor from speaking in council after he didn’t accede to their demands to withdraw or apologise.
Party councillors, joined by the EFF, stood up from their seats, repeatedly shouting that Brink was not going to address “drunkards”.
The public statement in question was made by Brink during a television interview when he reacted to the motive behind a motion of no confidence planned by the party against him.
Brink told a television broadcaster: “The ANC has not yet been rehabilitated. They don’t have a prospectus for how to govern the City of Tshwane. If you want to look at what their prospectus is – look at Joburg, look at Ekurhuleni. That is what they have to offer. To put the ANC in charge of Tshwane now would be like putting a hard-drinking person in charge of a bottle store.”
Inside Tshwane House council chambers, councillors from the ANC and EFF launched tirades against Brink for “disrespecting black people”.
ANC councillor Eulenda Mabusela implored Ndzwanana to ask Brink to apologise and withdraw all statements he made in the media against the ANC.
She said: “The executive mayor Cilliers Brink of this city doesn’t cease to be the executive mayor at any point when he is given a platform.”
On the other hand, some DA councillors came in defence of the mayor, asking council Ndzwanana not to entertain political talks that were said outside the council chamber.
ANC chief whip Aaron Maluleka said: “We are not in the executive. We do not have any platform to raise issues. We want to respond to a mayor who is a delinquent, who thinks he can speak at every turn. The context of our councillors here is that: is he (Brink) saying that blacks are inherently corrupt and drunkards? And that whites are inherently matriculants and they can’t go to school? Is that the case that we need to debate here?”
He went on to say the mayor must “know that he was talking nonsense”.
“He was insulting us as black people. Therefore we will insult him back. He is nothing, this boy,” he said.
He also claimed that Brink and Finance MMC Jacqui Uys have removed black employees from working in their office.
“The message that we want to take to the public is that we are working with people who think that blacks are inferior and drunkards,” Maluleka said.
ANC caucus leader Eugene Modise said his party no longer recognised Brink as Tshwane mayor.
“He is no more our mayor; he is the mayor of the opposition. We are not taking it kindly the manner in which he insulted our organisation and our regional secretary George Matjila.”
Matjila was said to be “upset” by new stringent rules governing the recently-awarded waste collection tender, requiring contractors to have “newish” trucks fitted with tracking devices and eNatis certificates to prove the roadworthiness of their vehicles.
Uys claimed Matjila told her that he would push for a motion of no confidence against Brink.
When Brink was finally asked to apologise, he said: “I can only withdraw something that I have said in this meeting. I can not withdraw or debate things that I said outside of the council meeting. There is no basis for that.”
He said he was happy to participate in a snap debate proposed by Ndzwanana on the matter, “but I am certainly not going to allow the freedom of speech in this council meeting to be curtailed to the extent that I have to withdraw things that were said in the public debate”.
His refusal to apologise elicited angry reaction from both ANC and EFF councillors, who vowed to prevent him from speaking, leading to Ndzwanana adjourning the meeting until further notice.
Pretoria News