A who’s who of mayoral candidates in the forthcoming local government elections. Howard Barrel and Jaspreet Kindra report Johannesburg
The political heavyweight in the African National Congress’s list of mayoral candidates, Amos Masondo, stands to become the first citizen of the country’s chief industrial and financial centre , with a gross domestic product that stands at R116- billion and accounts for 11% of the national gross domestic product. He serves as political adviser to premier Mbhazima Shilowa. His political cradle lies in black consciousness organisations in the 1970s, and he was jailed for six years on Robben Island for underground ANC activities. On his release in 1981, Masondo was instrumental in the formation of the then internal mass-based protest movement, the United Democratic Front (UDF). Masondo also had a stint in trade unionism as organiser of the General and Allied Workers’ Union in the 1980s and was active in the Soweto Civic Association. He was seen by the security police as the stoker of unrest in Soweto in the early 1980s, hence Masondo was one of the longest serving detainees of the time. After the first democratic election of 1994 he was elected as ANC member of the provincial legislature and the Gauteng MEC for health until 1998. In 1997 Masondo was elected to the ANC national executive committee and heads its election committee.
Mike Moriarty, Democratic Alliance (DA), acknowledges that his chances of becoming Johannesburg’s executive mayor are slim, but he does not accept that his hopes of doing so are unrealistic. The outcome will depend on the quality of the DA’s campaign, and which of the two main parties manages to motivate its voters to get to the polls on December 5. Moriarty, an engineer who also has a political science degree, has been a Johannesburg councillor since 1994 and became leader of the Democratic Party’s caucus in the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council in 1997. Aged 41, Moriarty believes Johannesburg “has suffered through neglect and mismanagement”, adding he believes a DA-led council could make it one of the world’s top 40 cities in just five years. “This can be done through management and partnership. The DA would put all the people first and not just some of the people. The council’s focus must be on providing the right environment for people to flourish in work and play,” he says. His emphasis will fall on “service delivery quality, cost efficiency, as well as social factors like law enforcement and job creation”. He added: “Those managers who achieve their targets will be rewarded. Those who don’t will have to step aside to make way for others who can do the job.” Cape Town The Peninsula populist, Peter Marais of the DA, looks likely to emerge after December 5 as the only megacity mayor belonging to an opposition party. Marais – orator, preacher and singer extraordinaire – is a wow among the coloured working class, whose interests he declares he champions. This should, at last, guarantee him the kind of status he has so long believed he deserves. A member of the small party known as the Congress of the People in 1982, he was in the People’s Congress Party a year later, then in the United Democratic Party, followed by the Labour Party in 1989, before joining the National Party in 1991, which is now being submerged in the DA. In between, he has found opportunities to play footsie with several other parties, among them the ANC.
A real power on the Cape Flats, he was a member of the prime minister’s economic advisory council between 1983 and 1985 and sat in the apartheid-era president’s council between 1984 and 1992. Since the onset of democracy in 1994, he has been a minister in the Western Cape provincial government – apart from a five-month period this year after he had been fired for open flirtation with the ANC and undermining Gerald Morkel’s leadership of the New National Party in the Western Cape. He was rehabili-tated in July. The charismatic Marais is likely to make a popular mayor, though he might well need a bit of management by his political superiors.
Lynne Brown is the “unknown quantity” in the ANC’s list of mayoral candidates for the six metros in the country. Brown is the Deputy Speaker in the Western Cape provincial legislature. A trained teacher, Brown has been involved with various women’s and community organi-sations since the early 1980s.
In 1979 she was chair of Mitchells Plain Youth Congress, a member of the United Women’s Organisation and served the UDF as a member of its finance committee until the organisation’s dissolution. Brown joined the ANC in 1987 and was elected to the provincial executive committee and later to the provincial working committee in 1999. She is still involved in educational projects and serves as board member of the national literacy project. She also chaired the standing committees on community services, health and welfare. Tshwane (Pretoria) One of the apartheid era’s more turbulent priests, the ANC’s Smangaliso Mkhatshwa is no stranger to Pretoria. He served on the secretariat of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) in the city from 1973 to 1988, becoming its secretary general in 1981. For much of that time he was a banned person, but this did not deter him from continuing with his anti-apartheid activities. He has again worked mainly in Pretoria as Deputy Minister of Education under, first, Sibusiso Bengu and, now, Kader Asmal. Mkhatshwa should make it as mayor quite comfortably – unless a high degreee of ANC voter apathy and an extraordinary DA effort coincide. Mkhatshwa, from Barberton, was educated at St Peter’s Seminary in KwaZulu-Natal and gained a BPhil and MA at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He was ordained in 1965 and served as a parish priest in Witbank before moving to the SACBC. He gained some distinction in later years as a liberation theologian.
He was detained in 1983 and again in 1986, when he was badly tortured by military intelligence, for which he received R25E000 in damages. In 1988 he became secretary general of the Institute for Contextual Theology.
An outspoken man, he is not renowned for his strategic sense – something he might need to balance the conflicting ethnic and other interests that so deeply divide Pretoria and surrounds. He is 61 years old.
In the unlikely, though not impossible, event that the DA’s Carl Werth makes it to the mayoral throne, he will have done so by a somewhat circuitous route. Politically, he has travelled from the old Progressive Federal Party, to the Conservative Party, to the Freedom Front to, now, the DA. Physically, he has lived and worked as a senior executive of a Swiss chemicals company in South Africa, Thailand and Japan. And in 1995 he was appointed South Africa’s high commissioner to Singapore, returning home last year. Werth joined the DP in 1998, while still in Singapore. In October last year he was elected DP chair in Gauteng. When the DP and NNP structures were combined recently to form the DA, he was elected DA leader in Gauteng North, and he topped the internal poll of the new party to become its mayoral candidate in Tshwane. He says he chopped and changed parties in his search for an organisation that shared his strong support for maximum devolution of government at the local level, which he believes is the way forward for South Africa. He left the FF when it became obsessed with achieving a Volkstaat. Port Elizabeth Robben Island veteran Nceba Faku (ANC) is often described as one of the city’s most prominent citi-zens. Elected mayor of Port Elizabeth in 1995, Faku has initiated numerous cultural, sporting and community initiatives in the area, and this earned him a string of awards. Born in New Brighton in Port Elizabeth, Faku took his plunge into the anti-apartheid struggle at an early age. He only got to complete matric while serving a 13-year sentence on Robben Island. Following his release he was elected regional organiser for the party in the Eastern Cape and held the ANC/South African Communist Party local government portfolio. An opposition candidate is expected from the United Democratic Movement. Durban
Not a man used to making flamboyant speeches and extravagant crowd-pleasing gestures, the ANC’s Obed Mlaba in the past four years has managed to make his presence felt in the coastal city in KwaZulu-Natal. He has done his job. The city during his tenure has successfully hosted at least two major international meets – the Non-Aligned Movement and the Commonwealth summit. The city owes its newly found international status to the construction of the International Convention Centre – a move spearheaded by the Durban Metro under his leadership. Mlaba holds an MBA in strategic marketing management from the International Management Centre, Buckingham. He cut his managerial teeth in industrial relations, business development and human resources with leading enterprises such as Huletts, Grindrod, South African Breweries and Eskom. In 1995 Mlaba was appointed chair of the executive committee of the Durban Metropolitan Council and was elected mayor the following year. The Inkatha Freedom Party is expected to field an opposition candidate to him. East Rand A former trade unionist and civic leader, Bavumile Vilakazi is the ANC’s foot soldier regarding the organisation of the party’s branches in Gauteng. He helped establish the Vaal Civic Association in the early 1980s. He was also one of the accused in the historic Delmas treason trial. He was involved with the Urban Training Project as an educator, and later joined Nampak Limited as a change process consultant until 1994. In Parliament he has served as party whip, chair of the party’s public enterprises study group and executive member of the Africa region of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.
Eddie Taylor (DA) comes from a business background, and claims to have a passion for creating jobs. He was moved by a speech delivered by Helen Suzman into joining the Progressive Party in 1961 at the age of 19. He says his “disgust in the apartheid policy and my liberal democratic principals” drove him to active politics, while still a master’s student pursuing chemical engineering at the University of Natal. Based in Edenvale since 1972, he has initiated various job-creation projects throughout the East Rand, notable among them is a sewing business and a candle-making enterprise set up in Tembisa and Dukatole respectively. He feels that most of councillors’ time and effort is wasted on administrative matters rather than on service delivery and job creation.