Steve Tshwete Local Municipality (formerly Middelburg Local Municipality) is located in the

Nkangala District Municipality Nkangala is one of the 3 districts of Mpumalanga province of South Africa. The seat of Nkangala is Middelburg. The Nkangala District Municipality consists of 160 towns and villages. The most spoken language of its 1,308,129 people is IsiNdebele wi ...

Mpumalanga Mpumalanga () is a province of South Africa. The name means "East", or literally "The Place Where the Sun Rises" in the Swazi, Xhosa, Ndebele and Zulu languages. Mpumalanga lies in eastern South Africa, bordering Eswatini and Mozambique. It ...

province,

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...

. The seat of Steve Tshwete Local Municipality is Middelburg. The local municipality was one of the four to have passed the 2009-10 audit by the

Auditor-General of South Africa The Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA) is an office established by the 1996 Constitution of South Africa and is one of the Chapter nine institutions intended to support democracy, although its history dates back at least 100 years. Tsakani Ma ...

, who deemed it to have a clean administration.Auditor-General urges South Africa’s mayors to lead the drive towards clean administration by 2014
The municipality is named after Steve Tshwete,

ANC The African National Congress (ANC) is a social-democratic political party in South Africa. A liberation movement known for its opposition to apartheid, it has governed the country since 1994, when the first post-apartheid election installe ...

activist imprisoned by the apartheid authorities on

Robben Island Robben Island ( af, Robbeneiland) is an island in Table Bay, 6.9 kilometres (4.3 mi) west of the coast of Bloubergstrand, north of Cape Town, South Africa. It takes its name from the Dutch word for seals (''robben''), hence the Dutch/Afrik ...

from February 1964 to 1983.

Main places

The 2011 census divided the municipality into the following main places:

Politics

The municipal council consists of fifty-eight members elected by

mixed-member proportional representation Mixed-member proportional representation (MMP or MMPR) is a mixed electoral system in which votes cast are considered in local elections and also to determine overall party vote tallies, which are used to allocate additional members to produce ...

. Twenty-nine are elected by

first-past-the-post voting In a first-past-the-post electoral system (FPTP or FPP), formally called single-member plurality voting (SMP) when used in single-member districts or informally choose-one voting in contrast to ranked voting, or score voting, voters cast their ...

in twenty-nine

wards Ward may refer to: Division or unit * Hospital ward, a hospital division, floor, or room set aside for a particular class or group of patients, for example the psychiatric ward * Prison ward, a division of a penal institution such as a priso ...

, while the remaining twenty-nine are chosen from

party list An electoral list is a grouping of candidates for election, usually found in proportional or mixed electoral systems, but also in some plurality electoral systems. An electoral list can be registered by a political party (a party list) or can ...

s so that the total number of party representatives is proportional to the number of votes received. In the election of 1 November 2021 no party won a majority on the council. The

African National Congress The African National Congress (ANC) is a Social democracy, social-democratic political party in Republic of South Africa, South Africa. A liberation movement known for its opposition to apartheid, it has governed the country since 1994, when ...

(ANC) was the largest party, winning twenty-one seats. The following table shows the results of the election.

Municipal services

Middelburg's municipal workers started sporadic strikes in September 2021, and these continued into 2022 which affected several services. Licenses could not be renewed at the license office, property transfers could not be done, refuse was not removed and security guards shot two strikers, while political parties chose not to intervene.

References

External links

Official homepage
{{Authority control Local municipalities of the Nkangala District Municipality