In reply to THIS LETTER to the Editor, Executive Mayor Gary van Niekerk said today:
The malicious and defamatory claims made by the DA are devoid of any truth as it is based on the careful omission of facts to deliberately smear the good names of my Chief of Staff, and I.
Firstly, the meticulously crafted libelous narrative, is underpinned with the lie that I entered into agreements with legal service providers to fight internal battles of my political party. Never at any point did I or any other leader in my party commit the municipality to foot legal bills of the National Alliance (Editor: And what about the Northern Alliance?).
As per SALGA guidelines – “The overall principle in the determination of the function of the speaker is that the speaker is in charge of the legislative arm of the municipal council. This means that he or she must guard the integrity of the legislative process. Further the speaker must protect the ‘checks and balances’ between the legislature and the executive, in other words, the ‘oversight’ that the council must exercise over the actions of the executive.”
The legal fees owed, accumulated between June 2022 and October 2022, when I acted on behalf of the municipal council as the head of the legislative arm (Speaker of Council), to address the legality of the meeting where the City Manager was appointed. Numerous legal battles emanating from this required legal intervention as well. At the time, I as the Speaker of Council, was prevented from using the resources of the municipality to protect the interests of council.
This was done in defense of the institution, as the Office of the Speaker and the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality were separately citied in the court documents.
The High Court of Gqeberha has found on more that one occasion, that since taking office as a councillor and right up to the time I took office as the Executive Mayor, I was in fact the Speaker of Council of the NMBM. Any so-called “acting speakers” were only appointed for the specific day where I was not present in the council meetings.
As a result, the previous Executive Mayor and the City Manager agreed that these fees should be paid. A memorandum, dated 18 January 2023, was drawn up to approve the payment with a deviation but was later abandoned by actors focused on cheap political gains instead of addressing urgent governance issues.
The “evidence” that my Chief of Staff tried to cover up “after reports emerged” by instructing that my name be removed from invoices, is deliberately presented out of context.
The email from the attorneys regarding the change of details on the invoice was received on the 3rd of August 2023, long before any so called “reports emerged”. The request that one invoice should reflect the case number as reference instead of my name was done simply for administrative reasons and not to whitewash any documents. All the other invoices already referenced the case numbers and not a name.
The claim of fraud and corruption as a result, is as juvenile as the intent behind the public claims made by the DA.
They should be embarrassed with this pathetic attempt to smear and divert our attention from providing services and professionally running an institution that was starved for so long, of vision, transparency and efficiency.
Editor: Now is probably the time to comment that the EFF Councillors in the present coalition government are playing the ‘look at me for Mayor’ game on Social Media as they run around the City making decisions about collecting outstanding payments from business and directing just where the Honeysuckers need to be in order to ‘serve the people’. Careful Gary, your enemies are within the folds of your coat and getting bolder!
NMB Communications
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