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On Wednesday, the executive mayor of Tshwane, Dr Nasiphi Moya, cut the electricity and water to the head office of the national Department of Basic Education in Pretoria. She announced it herself, on X, citing a combined debt of more than R104 million owed by some 200 schools. By the evening, she had ordered the services restored. In between, her own city manager conceded to the department’s director-general that the disconnection had been “made in error”. The mayor called the action one “born out of frustration and desperation”.

A municipality may disconnect a consumer who does not pay their own bill. It may not disconnect one body to recover a debt owed by another. The national department runs no schools, which are a provincial responsibility, and the R104 million is owed by schools that fall under the Gauteng Department of Education. The national department’s own municipal account, on its version, was paid up and in credit. The disconnection was unlawful.

The city knew as much. In May the Pretoria High Court interdicted Tshwane from cutting power to Gauteng schools over rates owed by the provincial authorities, and ordered it to restore those already disconnected. The mayor’s own statement acknowledged that judgement. Barred from cutting the schools, the city cut a national department instead. When that proved indefensible, her manager called it a mistake.

So why do it? The public disconnection forms part of a social media campaign, #TshwaneYaTima, which looks to frame the city administration as a tough government switching off defaulting institutions, from universities to hotels to government departments, to recover what it is owed.

The mayor’s posts fail to mention the body that actually owes the money, the Gauteng Department of Education (GDE), which owes Tshwane R104 million.  It would not be amiss to wonder whether Moya is hesitant to go after the GDE because the province is governed by the African National Congress (ANC), and she is only Tshwane mayor on their sufferance.

Moya is an ActionSA mayor, installed in October 2024 by the ANC and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and kept in place by them. Her deputy mayor, Eugene "Bonzo" Modise, from the ANC, is also the focus of several corruption investigations. Modise denies wrongdoing and says an investigation by the city cleared him. The EFF, meanwhile, for its part, is openly working to remove the city manager, Johann Mettler, over his refusal to drop the city's case against officials implicated in tender corruption.

The Moya administration appears to move fast against a department that has more than paid its bills, and slowly against the conduct alleged within its own ranks.

And while it plays politics with other people’s lights, the city is dark. Cilliers Brink, the former Democratic Alliance (DA) mayor of the city (who is also the DA’s candidate for mayor in Tshwane for the November local government elections) says that the capital now sees more outages than at the height of Eskom’s load-shedding. Tshwane deserves a mayor who takes the job seriously. What it has instead is a mayor who uses public power unlawfully, and posts about it for social media clout, instead of dealing with the rot under her very nose.