'CT might get a better mayor'
2006-02-27 20:44
Cape Town - Outgoing Cape Town mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo says although she believes that she has served the mandate of the African National Congress well, the organisation could deploy a person "much, much better than me" after this week's election.
Speaking at the Cape Town Press Club on Monday - just two days before Wednesday's local-government elections - the mayor was asked if she thought she would again be mayor, after already serving four years since the ANC won the council through defections by councillors in 2002.
Noting that the president announced all the metropolitan mayoral candidates after the elections results and that she was "No 1" on the proportional list for Cape Town, the mayor said: "I think I have delivered to the African National Congress mandate."
Predicting that her party would get at least half of the support of voters in the city - up from 37% in the last municipal poll in 2000 - she said: "I am not arrogant enough to say I am going to be the mayor of this city.
Not her prerogative to decide
"I am a deployed cadre of this organisation. I am not an individual here.
"I have been saying, if they don't deploy me as a mayor back in Cape Town... I am sure they will deploy a person much, much better than me in Cape Town."
"The answer is that it is not my prerogative to say that I am going to be the mayor."
During question time, the mayor objected to one questioner asking if she should not apologise for nepotism which had allegedly run rife in her council.
She objected to the question and to the questioner's heckling afterwards.
In an oblique reference to the mayor's main opponent, the Democratic Alliance's Helen Zille, Mfeketo said that the city should not behave like "an island" in South Africa and was part of the national agenda of transformation and upliftment.
Mfeketo said the government at local level had to carry out "a balancing act", acknowledging that the majority of the people had been excluded from proper services in the past.
She said that while "Rolls-Royce" services for a minority could not be sustained, the intention was not to destroy the good that the city had inherited from the past.
At the same time, the poor could not expect that they would move to houses in Bishopscourt, an upmarket suburb where the Anglican archbishop lives.
"It does not work like that," said the mayor.
'Need to accelerate delivery'
"Our manifesto talks about the basic services, and acknowledges that there is much more to be done.
"There are areas that still are on the bucket system, there are areas that do not have houses.
"We need to accelerate delivery," she said, noting that housing was not a local government competence, but a national one.
"We need to make interventions to strengthen the economy of Cape Town," she said, noting that the idea of an international convention centre had been fostered by the council.