The African National Congress (ANC) Interim Provincial Committee has confirmed the current speaker of the Mangaung Metro municipality Mxolisi Siyonzana as the mayoral elect for the city.
Siyonzana has previously served as Mangaung deputy executive mayor. The Metro has been without a permanent executive mayor since August last year.
Factionalism and political infighting within the ANC have prevented the metro from having a mayor for a year. Siyonzana who is the current Council speaker came out as favourite after being interviewed by the ANC’s National Executive Committee.
“The three names that were recommended are comrade Mxolisi Siyonzana comrade Mapaseka Nkoane and comrade Millicent Motingoe. All candidates demonstrated capacity at the interview on matters related to ANC policy, broad local government issues, challenges facing Mangaung Metro Municipality, and possible solutions. They all performed well and the national officials of the ANC then decided comrade Mxolisi Siyonzana would be the ANC candidate for the mayoral position in Mangaung” Free State ANC IPC Coordinator – Paseka Nompondo explains.
Residents say they want an Executive Mayor who will provide services and ensure that the City is clean. They have also complained about a high rate of unemployment.
“My feeling about this thing of service delivery is that we are choosing leaders that are not leaders like, they are just there to get something. Actually, they are not there to help people; it’s for their families. That’s all I can say,”says a resident.
“I just want to be honest first of all I would like to say leaders are not elected they are selected. So that’s where I want to start the point of service delivery for me really is not much of a big concern because it’s the same story all over, year in year out,” adds another resident.
I don’t know our Bloemfontein is dirty it should be cleaned. The municipality should do a lot. It should pick up garbage in townships even in town. It should hire more people to clean and there are a lot of people not working in Bloemfontein hence there are shutdowns,” says another resident.
Collapse of municipality
The Mangaung Freedom Front Plus councillor, Dr Elizabeth Snyman Van Deventer says the political infighting in the ANC has led to the collapse of the municipality.
“We can only hope that the new mayor will be able to deliver. Unfortunately the new mayor must still be elected so to say it’s only the ANC’s preferred candidate and hopefully if we do have a secret ballot that would influence the voting. I’m not sure if they are able to fix these huge factions within the ANC” says Dr. Elizabeth Snyman Van Deventer.
Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) Mangaung councillor, Paulnita Marais says the ANC Mayoral preferred candidate has been part of the divisions within the ANC camps.
“Service delivery is not going to happen even if he’s there because they are just recycling the members of the ANC, and nothing will happen because he was there even when the city manager was doing all these wrong things,” says Paulnita Marais.
Democratic Alliance (DA) councillor, David Masoeu says they are still waiting for a formal council meeting to convene for the new mayor to be formally elected.
“What makes it worse is that there’s no administrative leadership. And the question is why all of a sudden they believe that he should be made a mayor. The other thing that we want to know is he going to resign immediately; because he cannot be elected as the mayor up until that he has resigned. All this days to us is that the ANC again has started the electioneering its candidates the so-called cadre deployment,” says David Masoeu.
The Mangaung council meeting is expected to sit soon to deliberate on the matter to elect the new mayor.
VIDEO: ANC Interim Provincial Committee announces its preferred mayor candidate for Mangaung
