The Independent Democrats (ID) named its top team for the City of Cape Town after it opted this week to be part of the seven-party coalition, led by the Democratic Alliance (DA), which runs the city.
At a press conference at Parliament on Thursday — attended by ID leader Patricia de Lille — it was announced that the party’s candidate for deputy mayor, to serve as number two to DA mayor Helen Zille, is Charlotte Williams.
Outgoing deputy mayor Andrew Arnold, from the African Christian Democratic Party, has not yet resigned, but Williams is expected to receive the confirmation of the city council at the end of this month.
Arnold is expected to take up the sport portfolio on the mayoral committee.
Jameelah Daniels will be put forward as chairperson of the sub-council for the Athlone area. She is a former estate agent and was elected to the Cape Town city council for the first time in the March 2006 election as a proportional councillor.
She previously served with the New National Party (NNP) in Sydenham, Durban, in KwaZulu-Natal from 1996 to 1999.
Williams is also a former NNP councillor — for a Mitchells Plain ward — and was for a spell a member of the Democratic Alliance, when the NNP was part of the DA.
Williams was born in Kensington, Cape Town in 1957 and has been involved in politics since the late 1970s.
Williams anticipated that she would work well with Zille, even though there were some rumblings when she left the DA to rejoin the NNP in the previous council. She and Zille had respect for one another, she said.
Caucus leader Simon Grindrod is scheduled to take up the mayoral executive post in charge of economic and tourism affairs. A former hotel manager, he was the ID’s candidate for mayor in the 2006 municipal poll and became a councillor last year.
The new DA-led coalition now has 65% backing of Cape Town city councillors. It is the only metropolitan city not in the hands of the African National Congress. — I-Net Bridge