Just when you thought it was safe to sigh with relief after a new acting municipal manager had taken the helm of the bankrupt municipality and appeared to be turning it around – she resigns. Why? Well, from her resignation speech it appears there are plenty of reasons, some quite alarming.
I had never heard of Dr Michele Gratz until she was appointed acting municipal manager in February after the permanent incumbent had been suspended. A quick Google showed she had won awards for clean governance when she ran Mossel Bay Municipality, rated one of the country’s 10 best-run municipalities. Sounded promising. Gratz says when she took over at Knysna, “expenditure was out of control”. We all know that because the council was bankrupt. She set up a cost-cutting team and in the first month saved R1.2m by reducing unnecessary overtime. Then she got the municipal directors’ unlawful “scarce skills allowance” scrapped, saving another R117,000 a month. Then came cuts in salaries and bonuses, catering, travel and subsistence. Gratz estimates the overall savings she clocked up will amount to around R20-million. She says the electronic system of correspondence and record keeping was “a shambles” with over 9,000 outstanding items on it, some of which had not been attended to for eight months. She “compelled” staff to deal with this and reduced the backlog to 2,000. She says she tackled the items the auditor-general said needed to be addressed, as well as low productivity and misconduct. So why would this bankrupt, floundering municipality not grasp Gratz with both arms? According to her, there are officials in the municipality with personal agendas that are “more important to them than saving Knysna”. Some potentially good officials, she says, are too scared to make decisions and “do what is right” because of comeback from the dodgy officials. There is another more disturbing aspect she speaks about: an “external organisation” with “personal agendas and questionable mandates” that has been trying to dictate what happens at the municipality. Who are they? What is the name of this shadowy group? Who do they represent? Someone from this organisation apparently phoned deputy mayor Aubrey Tsengwa last week telling him: “The rats must go.” Alarmingly, Gratz believes the municipality is too broken for one person to put right, and believes Knysna must be put under Provincial Government administration. Some Knysna residents have launched a petition calling on Premier Alan Winde to appoint Gratz as the administrator of Knysna municipality. “Her unbelievable actions in sorting out many management issues in Knysna have been remarkable. We can no longer be apathetic about what happens to our town,” the petition says. By Tuesday it had around 3,000 signatures. Since 2015, two of Knysna’s municipal managers have been suspended, a third resigned after a year. There have been three acting municipal managers, one of which has resigned. How can a town function properly – let alone flourish – under these conditions? It is high time the Provincial Government stepped in and took control. There is too much at stake for them simply to turn a blind eye.
