Pretoria - A sole African Transformation Movement councillor, Mncedi Ndzwanana, is the new Speaker of council in the City of Tshwane.
Ndzwanana won by 105 votes during a secret ballot election on Monday night after he received the majority of the votes from the EFF and ANC.
He contested for the position against ActionSA’s Kholofelo Morodi, who only got 37 votes.
ActionSA councillor Morodi was fielded as candidate for the Speaker’s position by the multiparty coalition block, which include the DA, her party, FF+, ACDP, and IFP.
All in all 211 councillors cast their ballots and at least 69 votes belonging to the DA were spoiled.
DA caucus leader Cilliers Brink expressed disappointment after the Independent Electoral Commission of SA (IEC), which oversaw the voting process, discarded the party’s votes “as a result of the mark that was not of a secrecy ballot”.
Asked how the DA councillors voted, Brink told journalists that “we made a marking of our own” on the ballot papers when voting.
“So, once this stuff is reviewed you will clearly see where the marking is, next to the candidate of ActionSA. It was for transparency purposes,” he said.
He said the electoral law in the country was clear that whether a voter did “a cross, a circle, a number, an initial - you indicate clearly your intention and if you didn’t exceed the bound of the box next to the candidate that you want. If you make your intention clear that is a valid vote”.
Brink said his party believed the IEC had erred in its decision to discard its councillors' votes as spoiled and that it was a decision that was reviewable.
Regional ANC leader Eugene “Bonzo” Modise suggested that Morodi lost because “the whites have never agreed to be led by a black person”.
“So, we don’t worry whether they go to court or they go to hell. They have deliberately undermined a candidate of ActionSA. This was a deliberate move. They undermined her and they were not in favour of her. And we don’t care whether they go to court. They will never win in court because they spoiled the ballots themselves.”
Ndzwanana said he was not worried about a possible move by multiparty coalition to challenge the election results.
“The good thing about these elections today is that they were secret votes. They took a decision to vote the way they voted. For them to lose should never be my fault. I am not here to be liked by them; I am here to give service to the people of Tshwane,” he said.
He said his priority was to make sure parties in council change the city for the better.
“The culture that needs to be in this city from now on is to recognise everybody as equal. As a speaker I mustn’t have a minority party; I musn’t have a majority party. I must have an organisation; people that I work with, a unity of parties that are willing to form a unity in this city so that we move forward,” he said.
Ndzwanana came in as a new speaker after the position became vacant following the resignation of former speaker Dr Murunwa Makwarela on February 28.
Makwarela was elected Tshwane mayor, but he resigned on March 10 after it was found that he submitted a fraudulent insolvency rehabilitation certificate to Mettler.
The certificate was to serve as proof that eligible to occupy a public office after he was disqualified as a councillor after it surfaced that in 2016 the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria declared him insolvent.
Pretoria News