Makana Mayor Vumile Lwana says his role is to mobilise the council to be much more focused on service delivery.
Makana Mayor Vumile Lwana says his role is to mobilise the council to be much more focused on service delivery.
He concedes that the ANC caucus in the council is still divided. “How do voters feel when they hear about the mayoral elections ending in a 12-11 vote? It doesn’t augur well with their aspirations.”
He says the level of conflict in the council is unprecedented in Makana. He also says that in the interest of attracting investors to the town, the municipality’s political leadership should interact more with the public.
He attributes the frequent power and water outages to a lack of preventative maintenance on the municipality’s infrastructure.
The municipality relies heavily on intergovernmental grants such as the municipal infrastructure grant (MIG) but Lwana emphasises that these grants cannot be spent on the maintenance of the existing infrastructure itself.
He also says that the municipality has a problem with revenue management in that there is a “lack of debt collection”. At the end of March, the debt owed to the municipality in rates and services was over R142-milllion.
Thus a simple accounting principle can be applied: “Don’t spend money you don’t have when doing budget and let your expenditure be determined by your income,”he says.
Lwana reckons that the electricity tariff hike of 31.3% approved by the national electricity regulator will be a challenge for the municipality to bring into effect.
He says the unemployed majority in Makana are going to find it extremely difficult to cope with the new increase. In so doing, the municipality has to improve its communication strategies with the public and the mayor promises that the municipality has immediate plans on how it can achieve this goal.
Lwana was born and bred in Grahamstown to a large family with strong African values. However, he does not like to discuss his immediate family or siblings. He matriculated at Nathaniel Nyaluza Senior Secondary School during the 80s.
After joining Masifunde as a programmes co-ordinator in 1989, he looked after almost every aspect of the organisation before he became its director in 1994.
Between 1999 and 2000 he was voted chairperson of the Eastern Cape NGO coalition. His highest qualification is a National Diploma in Human Resources Management and he also did some studies in rural development at the University of KwaZulu-Natal which he could not complete due to high levels of political violence in the province building up to the 1994 general elections.
Lwana was voted as the first Makana executive mayor in December 2000 following the phasing out of transitional local councils and the amalgamation of councils in Grahamstown, Alicedale, Riebeeck East, Sidbury, Sevenfountains and Fort Brown.
He was the only mayor in Makana to have completed his full term when he handed over the baton over to his successor Pumelelo Kate in 2006.
However, he returned to the helm after Kate resigned amid a vote of no confidence from the ANC. The party’s caucus in the council filed the motion of no confidence on the grounds that Kate’s leadership failed to guide the council to realise its developmental goals.
During Lwana’s term as mayor the municipality won a Vuna Award from the Department of Provincial and Local Government for excellence in service delivery. The awards were introduced in 2003 to reward municipalities who exercise innovation and excellence in fulfilling their service delivery mandate.
Another highlight of Lwana’s first term of office was the successful application for the certification of its Quality Measurement System (QMS) from the South African Bureau of Standards.
The municipality was subsequently awarded the Certification ISO 9001: 2000 QMS which recognises the top quality of the provision of community and social services as well as corporate and financial services.
This application was meant to, among other things, increase the efficiency of service provided by the municipality to its residents.
