Cape Town - The EFF made sure its presence was felt on Thursday as it made its debut in the City of Cape Town in the first meeting after the August 3 elections.
Right off the bat, the party refused to agree to the first order of business - the adoption of the rules of the house - because they had not had input into them.
The party’s provincial secretary and whip, Melikhaya Xego, said the EFF weren’t “babies” and were ready for their new jobs.
“It’s not a political gimmick that people don’t have access to land. Cape Town is still prioritising bicycle lanes over housing. We are here to engage you in a very radical way,” he said.
Notable at the sitting were three former deputy mayors who returned to the council on Thursday, taking up seats on the back bench of the chamber. They had all risen to the position on the back of the coalition that had put the DA in power 10 years ago.
Andrew Arnolds was the most vocal of them as he led the EFF on their council debut. The EFF’s 7-strong group, all first-time councillors, is the second-largest opposition party in the city after the ANC.
Like their parliamentary counterparts, they wore their trademark red overalls and hard hats.
In 2006 when Helen Zille became mayor, Arnolds, then an ACDP member, became deputy mayor as his party were the kingmakers in that election.
He resigned in 2009, joining the EFF two years ago as its elections manager.
“The EFF is very involved on the ground and that is what the ACDP lacked,” he told the Cape Argus on the sidelines.
Alongside the EFF sat Arnolds’s successor as deputy mayor in 2007, Charlotte Williams.
Now a member of the ACDP’s caucus of three, Williams became deputy mayor when the ID strengthened the DA’s control in the city during the floor-crossing period.
A respected Mitchells Plain councillor, Williams was a sub-council chairwoman at the time of her resignation from council in 2008.
Williams then made way for the ACDP’s Grant Haskin to become Zille’s third deputy in two years.
Haskin has now also returned to the council after moving back and forth between stints in the provincial legislature over the years.
“We ask that the DA will take our proposals seriously because they are viable and not just rubbish them as in the previous term,” he said.
Among the ranks of the ANC, whittled down to 57 members, was the ANC’s chief rebel Andile Lili.
Since his suspension from the council and the ANC, Lili has endured an attempt on his life and received a suspended sentence for his poo-flinging activities.
But this time the men who formed the Ses’khona People’s Rights Movement were not sitting at the same table.
In the gallery was Lili’s former partner in crime, Loyiso Nkohla, now a DA man.
Hugged by a mayco member after the sitting, Nkohla insisted he would not return to the city benches as a councillor.
Committed to his civil rights movement, he said he would be deployed where the DA saw fit.
ANC leader Xolani Sotashe once again threw his hat into the ring to be voted in as mayor.
“We will be very aggressive in raising issues that affect the city.”
Sotashe challenged the city’s language policy, used for council documents and reports, which prescribes the recommendations of reports be published in three languages - English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa. Also back in the council after establishing his own party, the Democratic Independents, was Anwar Adams.
The previous council had recommended he be suspended for a month without pay earlier this year, for an alleged anti-Semitic post on his Facebook page.
Former political science lecturer and analyst Kenny Bafo has given up academia to replace Adams as the PAC’s sole councillor. He said there were many “silent voices” within the community who suffered from hunger, unemployment and gender violence.
Mayor Patricia de Lille said the DA’s two-thirds majority needed a credible opposition to monitor the exercise of power.
“We may be political adversaries but we need not be enemies. You represent a third of the electorate,” she said.
Cape Argus