The DA announced that Helen Zille will be the party’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg.
The DA said on Saturday that Helen Zille will be its mayoral candidate for Johannesburg. While some welcomed the news, others voiced their doubts over the DA leader’s suitability for the job.
One of those is ActionSA president Herman Mashaba.
Zille said she would restore service delivery in the city.
“The only job of local government is to deliver quality basic services. Water. Sewage. Refuse removal. Roads. Traffic lights. Electricity,” she said.
Mashaba took issue with this.
Mashaba says DA selects who to give services to
He said the DA claims to be successful in Cape Town, but many residents feel they are deprived of services.
“I’ll just invite anyone to go to Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, Langa, the Cape Flats and go and see the deprivation of services to our people,” he said.
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He repeated his claim that Zille worked with the ANC to remove him as Joburg mayor because he was trying to help black townships.
“[Zille] said to me that we should not really be providing services to people who don’t pay taxes, to people who don’t vote for the DA,” Mashaba said in an interview with Newzroom Afrika.
He asked whether Zille would be willing to provide the same services to Johannesburg’s townships as she would to other areas of the city.
“You cannot just obviously decide to only provide services to those who voted for you or give you the funding. You provide services particularly to the marginalised. If you look at our areas of Gugulethu or Khayelitsha, now you can imagine people of Soweto, are they going to be deprived of getting services from Helen?”
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ANC visits Cape Flats
Meanwhile, on the same day that Zille announced she was running for mayor, ANC chairperson Gwede Mantashe visited Philippi in the Cape Flats to assess service delivery in the area.
While denying that he was campaigning against the DA, he did speak to residents in the area about their concerns over a lack of service delivery.
One resident spoke to Mantashe about the DA-led municipality’s neglect of the delivery of basic services in Philippi.
Lungisa Somdaka, the ANC councillor in the region, also accused the DA of “undermining” their efforts to improve service delivery.
