KNYSNA POLITICAL NEWS - Recent court cases have shown that council meeting walkouts could have serious implications for the councillors involved.
The Constitutional Court case Kham v Electoral Commission in 2015 referred to this behaviour as “gravely irresponsible”.
In a more recent case this year, the DA and Others v Premier for the Province of Gauteng, the high court went further after it found that the direct cause of the Tshwane Council's inability to conduct its business in council meetings was the continued disruptions of the meetings by councillors staging walkouts.
“Walking out of council meetings does not serve the councillors' electorate and does not fulfil the constitutional and executive duties they were elected for,” the court said.
Professor Jaap de Visser from the Dullah Omar Institute summarised the principles confirmed in these two cases as follows: “While the councillors may have thought that by walking out they were challenging the Speaker’s decisions, which they thought were unlawful, the judge president had no sympathy. In fact, the judge president berated the MEC for local government of Gauteng for not using the Code of Conduct to deal with them decisively.”
In other words, the judge president was of the view that these councillors ought to have been charged, disciplined and (if they missed three consecutive meetings) possibly even removed from office, in terms of the Code of Conduct.
It is therefore clear that if a councillor or a group of councillors walk out of a meeting, they expose themselves to disciplinary action. The law is clear: not attending a meeting without leave of absence is a violation of the Code of Conduct and the Speaker “must” investigate violations of the Code of Conduct.
If a councillor or a group of councillors walk out of a meeting, they also expose themselves to individual liability. This will be the case when a walkout "collapses" the meeting. Such a walkout forces the municipality to convene another meeting. The municipality thus incurs fruitless and wasteful expenditure on a meeting that was entirely avoidable if everyone had simply obeyed the law.
The municipal manager will be forced by law to recover these costs from the councillors who walked out and caused the meeting to collapse.
The new powers of the auditor general make this threat even more relevant: if the municipal manager does not make an effort to recover these costs from the councillors, the Auditor General may come for the municipal manager by issuing a certificate of debt to the municipal manager.
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