Experts find City Council legal

THE Windhoek City Council is legally constituted, according to legal experts consulted by the City.
Two separate legal opinions sought last month on the legal standing of four Swapo councillors in the chamber both favour the ruling party.

At last Thursday’s monthly council meeting, Windhoek CEO Niilo Taapopi announced that both Dave Smuts and former Attorney General Hartmut Ruppel concluded that the Windhoek City Council is currently a legal 15-member local authority.The legal opinions come in the wake of the five opposition councillors insisting that the Council was not legally constituted after Swapo issued a withdrawal order of its councillors, namely Linea Shaetonhodi, Hileni Ilonga, Bjorn von Finckenstein and mayor Matheus Shikongo, to be replaced by four others.The news did not sit well with the five opposition councillors, although all but the UDF’s Werner Claasen accepted the opinions.The councillors were particularly unhappy with the appointment of Ruppel, as they considered his opinion to have been based on party loyalty. ‘Jesus Christ can come down today and ask Hartmut Ruppel for an opinion, it wouldn’t matter to me. He knows he held a Cabinet position once, and he knows exactly which party he belongs to. Let the records reflect that councillor Claasen and his party, the UDF, will not stand for this,’ said Claasen. ‘I’m extending an open, public invitation to the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) to get involved here. Maybe they will understand.’The opposition councillors also protested not having been involved in the decision over which lawyers to consult.In March, all five opposition councillors walked out of the monthly meeting in protest at the Swapo councillors’ immediate reinstatement, arguing that the Local Authorities Act was being contravened.According to their interpretation of the act, once the withdrawals were announced, the councillors’ positions became vacant and a process to fill these vacancies was to start, and end in an official swearing-in ceremony.According to the City’s own legal department, however, the positions would only have been considered vacant upon their being advertised in the Government Gazette.The rest of the council’s refusal then to get an independent legal opinion led to the opposition’s boycott of the meeting in April.A second council meeting was convened in April, where Mayor Shikongo instructed the CEO to seek legal opinion on the issue. At that meeting, Claasen was escorted out of the building for refusing to budge. Swapo’s regional executive tried to remove its four councillors because they wanted the CEO’s position to be advertised, instead of Taapopi being automatically re-appointed, as the party wanted.In his opinion, Dave Smuts said that Taapopi had prepared two draft notices for placement in the Gazette following two withdrawal notices from the Swapo Party, but that neither of these had taken effect.’Although two separate drafts were prepared for the purpose of providing notices in the Gazette … the CEO did not proceed to forward either one of these notices for placement in the Gazette. This is presumably because he was aware the withdrawals were being contested. On the very next working day after February 27 or by the following day, he was aware of the outcome of the Swapo Politburo meeting to revoke those purported withdrawals by reason of procedural irregularities,’ Smuts said.