A heated disagreement between Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba and the city’s head of communications and marketing has led to a hasty departure of the latter and threats of court action.
In a series of terse e-mail exchanges seen by Times Select‚ Mashaba accuses Makhudu Sefara‚ who resigned two weeks ago‚ and officials in his department of trying to sabotage the administration for an alleged failure to secure paid advertising space on Joburg-based community radio stations to carry the State of the City Address live.
In the e-mails Mashaba complains that he was contacted by two community radio stations who asked why the city had not contracted them to broadcast the address.
"Two major concerns I need to express. We have denied our communities a right to listen to the address. We have failed to support our SMMEs (small, medium and micro enterprises). I take this failure to be a deliberate action of officials to sabotage our administration, or total lack of leadership of the department or don’t-care attitude,” he wrote.
In his response‚ Sefara pointed out that the radio stations could not be contracted because they were not compliant with the city’s procurement processes‚ before telling Mashaba to butt out of procurement matters.
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