Steve Tshwete Municipality (; ; ; ), formerly Middelburg Municipality, is a local municipality within 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 ...

, in the

Mpumalanga Mpumalanga () is one of the nine provinces of South Africa. The name means "East", or literally "The Place Where the Sun Rises" in the Nguni languages. Mpumalanga lies in eastern South Africa, bordering Eswatini and Mozambique. It shares bor ...

province of

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...

. The seat is Middelburg. The local municipality was one of the four to have passed the 2009-10 audit by the Auditor-General of South Africa, 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 Steve Vukhile Tshwete (12 November 1938 – 26 April 2002) was a South African politician and activist with the African National Congress. Involved in Umkhonto we Sizwe, Tshwete was imprisoned by the apartheid authorities on Robben Island from ...

, an ANC activist imprisoned by the apartheid authorities on

Robben Island Robben Island () 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 language, Dutch word for seals (''robben''), hence the Dutch/Afrika ...

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 type of representation provided by some mixed electoral system, mixed electoral systems which combine local Winner-take-all system, winner-take-all elections with a Compensation (el ...

. Twenty-nine are elected by

first-past-the-post voting First-past-the-post (FPTP)—also called choose-one, first-preference plurality (FPP), or simply plurality—is a single-winner voting rule. Voters mark one candidate as their favorite, or first-preference, and the candidate with more first- ...

in twenty-nine wards, 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 c ...

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 political party in South Africa. It originated as a liberation movement known for its opposition to apartheid and has governed the country since 1994, when the 1994 South African general election, fir ...

(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