The following is the Cape Argus leader piece which appeared on page 14 of Thursday’s newspaper edition.
Cape Town mayor Dan Plato is perhaps the luckiest mayor of a major city in South Africa.
Apartheid’s legacy and a lack of political will from the DA to change the status quo brought us someone like Plato.
His second stint as Cape Town mayor is as unremarkable as his first: a steady hand, don’t rock the boat and occasionally attack the poor in word and deed.
Surrounded by an army of aides, advisers and spin doctors he doesn’t have to say or do much.
Occasionally he pops out from the comfort of his plush office on the sixth floor of the Civic Centre for a photo opportunity, perhaps to remind Capetonians that the city does have a mayor.
Prone to gaffes, Plato, unlike his Greek namesake, has a limited vocabulary and often stumbles over his words.
So when he was pressed last week, at a meeting in Ocean View about a housing development in the area by a local activist, the mayor's response was “shut up”.
Plato was further caught on video pointing a finger in the face of Aslam Richards, an activist for the Cape Coloured Congress (CCC), which has used insurgent tactics to show up the DA, which in the absence of opposition from the ANC has dominated electoral politics in the Western Cape for the past 15 years.
But the tea leaves suggest that the DA, although the strongest political force in the Western Cape, is not assured of an outright victory after the 2019 general elections in which the party fared poorly, and has yet to recover from the fallout of previous mayor Patricia de Lille’s forced ouster and former leader Mmusi Maimane’s axing.
In all this time Plato has been a passenger on the DA’s gravy train, parachuted into one post after the other without leaving his mark. Pliable, amenable and limp-wristed, that’s how the DA prefers them, as opposed to someone like De Lille.
In a few months, the DA will have to find a mayoral candidate, and there’s a strong likelihood that the person on the lamp poles will not be Dan Plato for all the reasons mentioned above.
[Read the reply from the mayor: “We do what we can to deliver best service possible, says Mayor Dan Plato”]
Cape Argus