Cape Town - The ANC has appointed South African Football Association president Danny Jordaan as mayor of the Nelson Mandela Bay in an effort to revive its fortunes in the region and to retain control of the metro in next year’s local government elections.
“He will be heading the Nelson Mandela Bay metro and his appointment will be confirmed as soon as the council meets,” ANC spokesman Keith Khoza said on Monday.
“We are seeking to address the challenges facing the metro and to ensure that we are an effective local government.”
Khoza confirmed that the job had proven too much for 83-year-old former MP Benson Fihla, who was drafted in as mayor in 2013.
“The current mayor is an old man and to run a metro as big as that you need somebody younger and more energetic. It is not fair to place that strain on Oom Ben.”
Jordaan will face a challenge in the local govenrment poll from Democratic Alliance Eastern Cape leader Athol Trollip, who has been confirmed as the opposition’s mayoral candidate for the metro.
In the national elections in 2014, the ANC received 48.8 percent of the votes with the DA closing in on it with 40.8 percent.
The DA, which routinely polls stronger in local than national elections, was hoping to wrest control of the metro from the ANC next year.
In the last local elections in 2011, the ANC’s vote share dropped from 66.5 percent to 51.9 percent. This translated directly into a 15 percent increase in votes for the DA, which had made it an election mission to clinch the metro in 2016, a feat it also hopes to pull off in Tshwane, and to win four more municipalities in the Eastern Cape region.
The student council at the University of Port Elizabeth is controlled by the DA and the party was further buoyed by winning student representation at Fort Hare, a citadel of the anti-apartheid struggle, earlier this month.
However, next year the two parties will for the first time face competition from the Economic Freedom Fighters at local government level and the ANC will go to the polls weakened by the deep divisions within Cosatu in the Eastern Cape.
Trollip, who was elected DA federal chairman at the party’s federal congress in Port Elizabeth earlier this month, said Nelson Mandela Bay was the “most vulnerable” of ANC-held metros the DA was aiming to win and bringing in Jordaan to run against him was a desperate move.
“I think the ANC is being panicked into this but it is a rash decision to bring somebody back into the political arena to right the wrongs that are going down here,” he said.
The ANC has for some time been mulling whether to replace the leadership of the metro or to place it under administration.
Summing up the municipality’s biggest woes, Trollip said: “The city is running out of water, it has no public transport and it has been exporting its biggest resource - its people - to other provinces.”
“We are on the verge of winning Nelson Mandela Bay and we are going all out. The answer is not to replace the mayor but to replace the dysfunctional ANC.”
Port Elizabeth-born Jordaan’s last high profile outing as a politician was serving as an MP from 1994 to 1997, leaving to become Safa’s chief executive officer and twice leading South Africa’s bid to host the Fifa Football World Cup, succeeding the second time to bring the tournament to the country in 2010.
ANA