President Thabo Mbeki is behind African National Congress (ANC) plans to replace Cape Town’s executive mayoral system with an executive committee, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said on Friday.
If successful, the plan will strip the city’s DA mayor, Helen Zille, of her powers.
Writing in his weekly newsletter on his party’s SA Today website, Leon said Mbeki was instrumental in the decision to launch the plan.
”President Mbeki was apparently instrumental in the behind-the-doors decision to launch this latest assault on Mayor Zille’s powers — a meeting at which he was elected an ex-officio member of the ANC’s provincial executive,” he said.
It was a breathtaking irony that while loudly proclaiming on South Africa’s high democratic standing, Mbeki had ”at the same time, eagerly partnered a patently undemocratic plan” to unseat Zille.
Leon said Mbeki had played a ”leading role” in the affair.
If the change goes through, it will see Zille’s seven-party coalition, which is currently running the city, give way to an executive collective committee, on which parties will be represented proportionally in terms of the number of votes they received in the March 1 local election.
Leon said the ANC plan had brought ”the moral equivocation that has long marked Mbeki’s presidency” into sharp focus.
Proposed change
Earlier this week, Western Cape provincial minister of local government Richard Dyantyi sent a letter to the city notifying it of a proposed change to the municipal structure.
Zille replied on Tuesday by saying that Dyantyi’s move to change Cape Town’s system of government was a blatant abuse of power with serious implications for South Africa as whole.
Zille said the ANC and its ally, the Independent Democrats (ID), would have a majority in a 10-member executive committee.
In a statement read on behalf of the city’s multiparty government (MPG), she said the MPG would fight Dyantyi’s move all the way to the Constitutional Court if necessary.
”We will resist this abuse of power with everything it takes,” she said.
”We will not lie down like doormats and enable the ANC to take back without a single bit of resistance the only major city where they lost.”
Zille’s Democratic Alliance won 91 seats in the 210-member council in this year’s local government polls. The ANC took 81, the ID 22, and the African Christian Democratic Party and other parties threw in their lot with the DA to form a fragile ruling alliance.
Dyantyi said in a media statement that his proposal was motivated by a desire for a stable and inclusive city government that represented a far greater proportion of the electorate than the current one did.
Zille said she had ”every good reason” to believe Dyantyi’s move was discussed at a recent meeting of the ANC’s Western Cape executive attended by party leader Thabo Mbeki, ”and that the instruction for this letter to be sent comes from the very highest levels of the ANC”.
”And that is what makes it even more disturbing.”
Though there were some democrats in the ANC, others seemed to believe the party had a divine right to rule everywhere, all the time.
”The implications are so grave, for South Africa being seen to fail the biggest test of democracy since 1994, because that’s actually what’s happening here,” she said.
Dyantyi said in his letter that the change would be done in terms of the Local Government: Municipal Structures Act. — Sapa