Cape Town mayor Helen Zille was acting as if she was a ”mayor in opposition”, unable to rise above the interests of her party, the Democratic Alliance, African National Congress Western Cape chairperson James Ngculu said on Tuesday.
Ngculu was addressing a media briefing in the city after a two-day meeting of his provincial executive, focusing on the political challenges in the Western Cape.
”She acts as a mayor of the DA, not as a mayor of the people of the city of Cape Town, ” he said.
”What informs her actions are the policies of the DA in terms of the racial divisions, the polarisation, the vindictiveness, the retributions that are taking place in the city of Cape Town.”
Ngculu said the DA’s populist policies made it ”very difficult for people of honour to survive” under such conditions.
”Our mayor … doesn’t act as a mayor of the citizens of the city of Cape Town, but acts as a mayor of the DA.”
He also criticised the way officials had been treated in the city by the new DA administration.
Former city manager Wallace Mgoqi had been treated in ”the most uncouth, in the most rude and in the most obscene manner we’ve ever seen in any layer of government since our advent of democracy”.
Mgoqi was ousted from his office when the Cape High Court overturned an extension to his contract, entered into only days before the previous ANC administration was voted out in the March 1 local government polls. — Sapa