Mpumalanga ANC chairperson Ndlovu appointed Cogta MEC
Refilwe Mtshweni-Tsipane, premier of Mpumalanga. Photo: Archive
Mpumalanga Premier Refilwe Mtshweni-Tsipane has appointed recently elected provincial ANC chairperson Mandla Ndlovu into her cabinet as Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) MEC.
Ndlovu’s appointment proves his promise that he never intended to take the premiership after his election into the top job.
There has been a vacancy in the Mpumalanga cabinet since ANC treasurer Mandla Msibi stepped aside as Agriculture, Rural Development, Land and Environmental Affairs MEC late last year after he was charged for double murder and attempted murder.
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Ndlovu replaces Busi Shiba, who was acting in Msibi’s position while also serving as Cogta MEC.
Although it was expected that there would be a wholesale reshuffle in both cabinet and legislature since the provincial ANC conference last month, Mtshweni-Tsipane made no other changes.
Most new provincial executive committee (PEC) members are not in cabinet.
Ndlovu and the new PEC have also insisted that they would rather focus on organisational renewal than on purging members who were not part of their faction from their government positions.
Mtshweni-Tsipane said she worked with Ndlovu for a long time and is comfortable with him in her cabinet even though he is the provincial chairperson.
She said:
I’m the boss and he is the MEC deployed to executive government work. We work together elsewhere [in the ANC] and there, he is the boss. I’m also equally liable to report certain things to him. We have been doing this for a long time. He is no stranger to me. There’s nothing he knows that I don’t know. What enjoins us is that we must better the lives of the people of Mpumalanga. To me, this is just business as usual.
She chose Cogta for Ndlovu because of his familiarity with the challenges that Mpumalanga faces in local government, and also for his analytical and solution-orientated abilities.
READ: Mandla Ndlovu consolidates power in Mpumalanga after clean sweep
“This decision was partly informed by the briefing I received from the Auditor-General on the overall audit outcomes for municipalities. My key takeaway from that meeting is that while we continue to record gradual improvement year on year in terms of the audit performance, the results of the recent local government elections and the service delivery-related issues that bedevil most municipalities enjoin on us the responsibility to make changes that will aid us in improving municipal audit performance, removing operational bottlenecks to improve efficiency of service delivery and, most importantly, positioning municipalities as key nodes of economic development through the implementation of effective frameworks that promote intergovernmental cooperation through the district development model,” she said.
Ndlovu is a trained teacher. He worked as a councillor in the Bushbuckridge Local Municipality and thereafter became ANC secretary of the erstwhile Bohlabelo region. He was the elected provincial ANC secretary when Deputy President David Mabuza served his last term as premier. He acted as provincial chairperson when Mabuza was elected into national office in 2018, until Mpumalanga convened its conference last month.
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