At 35, it’s tempting to make parallels between Tshwane’s new executive mayor Cilliers Brink and his counterparts in Cape Town and uMngeni, better exposed Young Lions of the Democratic Alliance. If anything, though, the legally-trained Pretoria lad faces an even more formidable challenge than counterparts Geordin Hill-Lewis and Chris Pappas. While they run local governments where the DA enjoys an outright majority, Brink leads a fragile political coalition recently embarrassed by a handful of members who secretly voted with the ANC/EFF rivals. But Brink sees his glass as half full. In this interview, he explains what is being done to overcome recent setbacks, including a missed opportunity to tackle load-shedding and an appalling audit report. He spoke to Alec Hogg of BizNews.
Timestamps from the interview
- 01:23 – Cilliers Brink on his background
- 02:23 – On the DA’s young lions Geordin Hill Lewis and Chris Pappas
- 05:21 – Cilliers Brink on the challenges of coalition politics, dating back to 2021
- 07:52 – What made him put his hand up for the job
- 08:59 – His response to Frans Cronje’s analysis of the coalition situation
- 13:21 – What went on in Tshwane with DA’s council budget
- 17:48 – What he can do now to help make a difference in Tshwane
- 20:20 – End
Excerpts from the interview
Cilliers Brink on the challenges of coalition politics that actually date back to 2016
I want to go back to 2016 – the first time that the ANC was deposed in these metros, Jo’burg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay. The problem was that in Joburg and Tshwane the coalitions didn’t have a clear majority. So holding a coalition together is a challenge in and of itself. If your coalition doesn’t have a majority and if you have to negotiate with, for instance, the EFF to have your budget passed, that is an absolutely disastrous situation. And hoping to achieve rapid and clear progress under those circumstances is very difficult. The benefit of 2021 is that our coalition, the parties that are working in the multi-party coalition; the DA, ActionSA, Freedom Front Plus, ACDP, IFP, and back then it was still COPE – those parties had a majority and even without COPE, we still have a majority.
But unfortunately earlier this this year, well last month – it feels like months – but it’s in fact just been a month now, some of the councillors who are in our coalition, who count among what I call our majority, clearly voted for the COPE candidate, effectively the ANC/EFF puppet candidate for mayor of Tshwane, Murunwa Makwarela. It was an agonising process by the parties in the coalition to identify these individuals, ActionSA has subsequently fired three of their councillors, and it’s emerged that another of councillors of theirs was offered 2 million rand, which to his credit he rejected and the police are now investigating that case.
So it’s clear that in Tshwane, the ANC/EFF coalition depended on secret crossovers, I won’t call them traitors because that’s a bit of an emotive tag. Those crossovers were there to do what they wanted them to do – whether it is to form a new government, a puppet mayor, or simply to create the conditions to place Tshwane under administration. Finally, we have defeated those attempts, but there is a lot of work that lies ahead.
On his response to Frans Cronje’s analysis of the coalition situation
I watched that interview and I spoke to Frans afterwards to understand his analysis of the situation at Eskom. But he’s quite right. Coalitions are extremely complicated. We mustn’t romanticise coalitions. We can do our best to make coalitions a success. But the example of the power stations is where there was a failure to agree on the side of the coalition. Randall Williams, who was the mayor, then, came with a proposal to use the coal fired power stations in Pretoria that have fallen into disuse in the past ten years – Pretoria West and Rooiwal. And one of the coalition partners objected to the way that happened. And so maybe that could have been handled differently. And hopefully now we can put out a request for proposals and see how we can use the market in order to use these assets of the city to become more independent of Eskom.
But the point is that it was a failure in terms of coalition management and coalition agreement. And I’m not I’m not going to claim that I will be brilliant at this. Coalitions are inherently unstable and complicated, and so we have to learn from our mistakes and try to do better. But Frans is quite right in the sense that the ANC wants to point to these cities. In fact, they actively want to sabotage these cities. And there’s no doubt in my mind I don’t want to overemphasise this point, but there are still deployed cadres who work in these municipalities, and they aren’t independent, apolitical civil servants. They are political agents, and they are doing their best to make us fail. But at the same time, there’s also a majority of municipal officials who are willing to serve the government of the day. But indeed, we have to take that criticism very seriously, and get our house in order, make sure that there’s proper agreement, when we put good policy solutions on the table.
The upside of Tshwane compared to Joburg in Ekurhuleni is that in Tshwane we have a majority. We’ve got 50% plus one of the seats. And without that you can’t appoint a good city manager. You can’t discipline poor performing officials, you can’t pass a budget, you can’t pass a bylaw. So that we have a place, that came under challenge. I think we have our house in order now, but it doesn’t mean that we’re out of the woods.
In fact, many of the problems that we now have, the controls that have broken down, the institutional issues, the dip in revenue collection can be traced back to those seven months in 2020, during the COVID lockdown when the ANC Gauteng government placed Tshwane under administration.
On the big issues present in Tshwane
The big issue in Tshwane is that our expenses exceed our income. The city has a very poor credit rating. We cannot finance our shortfall in the capital or the operational side because of that work credit rating. All of the cities, by the way, have been downgraded, but Tshwane has been downgraded more because there have been these systemic financial issues and we have to get in there and make the tough decisions, reverse some of the damage and convey a sense of confidence and trust. The one upside in this, is that we have for the first time in Tshwane in my memory, a competent, apolitical city manager by the name of Johann Mettler. Now, if you’ve read the book How to Steal a City, you’d know that Mettler was sent in by the National Treasury to help fix Nelson Mandela Bay. He was reappointed by Athol Trollip and he did an excellent job until a shaky coalition brought down the entire government as well as a competent official. We’ve managed to recruit him at Tshwane. Jo’burg failed the opportunity of recruiting him because of Coalition issues again. But he’s here and that’s very important because without a competent, apolitical top official who’s willing to implement the manifesto, the coalition, we will see the failures of the past repeating themselves.
We’re still in a very complicated situation where there is, for example, an ANC/EFF speaker and that person can abuse his power to disrupt things, to prevent us from passing an adjustments budget, from putting a budget for next year on the table. And the risk there is, of course, that that creates the conditions for Tshwane to be placed under administration by the ANC Gauteng government, which has happened before, and it had a disastrous effect on the city.
Read more: Premium: Rob Hersov on ‘dam-busting’; rejuvenating SA’s Rainbow Coalition; and Capexit post-2024
