Bitou municipality a hung council again
Uncertainty reigned in Plettenberg Bay when local government elections results revealed the Bitou Municipality had yet again become a hung council.
|||Plettenberg Bay - Uncertainty reigned in Plettenberg Bay on Thursday when local government elections results revealed the Bitou Municipality had yet again become a hung council.
While the Democratic Alliance (DA) received the majority of votes, 48.58%, enough to give the party six seats, it was not sufficient for an outright majority.
The African National Congress (ANC) received 40.99% of the support, also giving it six seats, while the African United Front (AUF) managed 5.36% of the votes for the final seat.
It was a similar picture in 2011 which saw a subsequent power struggle between the two main parties which ultimately led to severe political turmoil and several court battles in 2014.
There was no confirmed coalition agreement between either party and the AUF by the time of publishing. The DA in the Southern Cape also lodged a complaint with the Independent Electoral Commission of SA over the results claiming that there could have been issues with calculations.
The IEC confirmed the complaint and stated that Bitou’s results were in the process of being verified. During the last local government elections it was the Congress of the People (COPE) that secured the final seat in what became a hung council and subsequently formed a coalition with the DA to lead the municipality.
The COPE member and deputy mayor at the time, Adam van Rhyner, after three years, however went against his party’s national coalition agreement with the DA in hung councils and decided to side with six local ANC councillors to call for a special council meeting to serve a motion of no confidence in among others, mayor Memory Booysen.
This followed three lengthy Western Cape High court applications including to stop the meeting from taking place. This battle dragged on until the sudden resignation of one of the ANC councillors, Nolan Stuurman, which subsequently led to a by-election in September that year which the DA won, giving the party outright majority in council.
This also meant that the ANC councillors and Van Rhyner no longer had the majority votes to serve the motion. Van Rhyner was later suspended by the party after breaching its national coalition agreement with the DA.
The DA’s Southern Cape manager Jaco Londt said the party had lodged a complaint with the IEC shortly after the results became available as experts believed there were likely issues with the calculations and loading of the final results.
“We’ve done our calculations and it could just be that the DA won outright majority, but we will have to wait and see until the results are verified.”
He explained that preliminary results showed that the DA won its seventh seat by about 300 votes, but when results were loaded it showed it had lost the this seat by 41 votes.
IEC spokesman Trevor Davids confirmed that a complaint had been lodged and said they were in the process of verifying the results. He did not say when this would be available.
ANC mayoral candidate and former Bitou mayor Euan Wildeman said he did not want to comment on election matters before “talks had been completed”.
ANC regional secretary for the Southern Cape, Major Sokopo, said that no coalition agreement was in place between the ANC and AUF and talks would not begin until the final results were released.
African News Agency