By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The City of Ekurhuleni council meeting to elect a new mayor was postponed on Wednesday after a collapse in negotiations between the EFF and ANC.
Councillors from the metro were expected to elect a new mayor, following the ouster of the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) Tania Campbell from office last week, through an ANC-sponsored motion of no confidence.
Campbell is expected to stand again as the DA’s mayoral candidate after she was in power for 11 months.
Ekurhuleni council Speaker Raymond Dlamini, from the DA, announced that the next council meeting to elect a new mayor would be within seven days’ time.
This follows the requests from the majority of political parties present, agreed to the postponement of the sitting.
Councillors from the EFF and the ANC cited technicalities for the reasons behind the postponement.
This comes after intense negotiations between the ANC and the EFF, on the sidelines of the council meeting, deadlocked over which candidate to back for the mayoral position.
The ANC was expected to back the EFF’s provincial chair Nkululeko Dunga to become the metro’s new mayor.
In exchange, EFF councillors in Johannesburg are expected to support the ANC’s Dada Morero to become Joburg mayor.
However these requests failed based on a lack of agreement between the two parties on the distribution of political power in the metro.
Mzwandile Masina, a former Ekurhuleni mayor and the ANC regional leader, was touted as a possible candidate but he has since confirmed he will not stand. The name of Masina’s deputy, Jongizizwe Dhlabathi, was also mentioned.