By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The African National Congress (ANC) has successfully taken back control of the City of Johannesburg.
ANC’s Dada Morero has replaced DA’s Mpho Phalatse who was voted out after a no-confidence motion.
Morero said there were two things he would need to do immediately – to fix the city’s finances and sort out the electricity crisis.
“The most important part is to fix the finances of the city which is in a crisis. Our budget is R3 billion under and we are not able to meet the deficit. The collection rate has dropped under 80% so we are going to spend time balancing the finances.
“We are also going to implement the energy mix strategy we had developed it in 2016 before 2016 happened [when the DA took over the city]. If that didn’t happen, we wouldn’t have had an energy crisis.”
The party, through the assistance of smaller partners and the Patriotic Alliance, which was previously in a multi-party coalition with the DA, managed to unseat Phalatse.
The ANC, AIC, Al-Jama-ah and other minority parties voted in support of the motion against Phalatse.
Morero was the only name brought forward during nominations.
This is the second time the ANC has been successfully able to remove the DA from power in the country’s economic hub.
It beat out a DA-led coalition in 2019 after losing the majority at the polls in 2016.
Today’s developments come after a tumultuous period in which the DA’s Vasco da Gama was voted out as speaker of the Johannesburg council. On Thursday, new speaker Colleen Makhubele of Cope called a special sitting of council for today, just days after being elected.