The Johannesburg high court has declared the City of Johannesburg's March 2024 resolution to allocate eight VIP protection officers to the mayor unconstitutional and invalid and set it aside.
On March 20 2024, the city council adopted a resolution endorsing a VIP protection policy. At the time the resolution was adopted, the practice was to provide the executive mayor with 10 personal protection officers, but this was later revised to eight.
The speaker was given eight, while members of the city council's mayoral committee and the chairs of two other committees were each afforded between two and five personal protection officers.
In May, the DA challenged the decision and approached the court to have the decision set aside.
In his judgment on Thursday, judge Stuart Wilson said the city council had not obtained a threat assessment or other report from police that might have justified any of these departures from the ministerial determinations.
Currently the minister's allowance for the executive mayor, deputy executive mayor, deputy mayor, speaker or whip of a municipal council is to be provided with two bodyguards per shift of a two-shift system. However, this can be increased if there is a threat assessment that has detected risk.
“The papers in this case suggest that the city council might have thought that it could obtain a threat assessment after passing and implementing the March 20 2024 resolution.
“If the city council did think that, then it fell into error. Both the minister's determinations and the act [Remuneration of Public Office Bearers Act] require a threat assessment to be conducted before an expansion of security provision beyond the default limits set in the determinations can be implemented,” reads the judgment.
Wilson also noted how the city failed to outline in its papers what the practical effects were of invalidating the March 20 2024 resolution and setting aside the personal protection allowances it formalised for the safety of the city's senior officer bearers.
“There is little more than a reference in the application papers to a shooting incident involving the city council's chief whip (the answering affidavit says that the chief whip was killed, but the letter to which the affidavit refers says only that he was 'shot at').
“At the hearing of this matter, I afforded the city a further week in which to adduce facts addressing the likely impact of relief reversing the resolution, the VIP policy, and the allowances that it formalised. Over two weeks later, the city filed a short affidavit which contained almost no information of value,” Wilson said.
The affidavit emphasised that the city's executive mayor and the city council's speaker had recently been replaced, he said.
“The affidavit referred again to the shooting incident involving the City Council's chief whip (it seems, happily, that the chief whip survived the incident, the contents of the answering affidavit notwithstanding).
“The affidavit also referred to an incident in which an ordinary councillor was apparently killed during a protest in Alexandra. That is obviously tragic, but it is not directly relevant to the terms of a suspension order in this case, because the city's VIP protection policy does not provide an ordinary councillor with a personal protection officer as of right.
“Accordingly, invalidating the policy would make no difference to an ordinary municipal councillor,” reads the judgment.
Wilson said both the act and the determinations by the minister are designed to prevent the creation of armies of security guards surrounding public office bearers, insulating them from the people they are appointed or elected to serve.
“The value of public accountability is enshrined in section 1(d) of the constitution. It is a basic requirement of accountability that public office bearers should be reasonably accessible. They are not entitled to exist in a security bubble, abstracted from the day-to-day concerns of the public.”
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