Durban - THE ANC’s disagreement over who should be appointed as deputy mayor in the eThekwini Municipality was apparently the real reason why the Full Council meeting collapsed on Thursday.
This was according to an ANC councillor who spoke to the Daily News after the meeting collapsed.
The councillor, who declined to be named, said there was a quorum for the meeting, with more than 100 ANC councillors present along with DA councillors, but the ANC’s regional leadership had apparently called it off fearing the party would lose the deputy mayor’s position to DA candidate Nicole Graham.
The ANC councillor is part of former mayor Zandile Gumede’s camp who want Gumede elected ANC regional chairperson.
The other ANC faction wanted Thabani Nyawose elected ANC regional chairperson after the ANC provincial conference. He said Nyawose’s camp wanted Ntokozo Sibiya to be elected eThekwini deputy mayor while provincial leadership had opted to bring in former councillor Diane Hoorzuk instead.
He said the councillors who did not want Hoorzuk had threatened to abstain or spoil ballot papers and this was going to favour the DA's candidate.
“The quorum was there. I think the ANC, after seeing that some councillors did not like Hoorzuk, feared the embarrassment of losing the position to the DA, it cancelled the meeting so it was not true the quorum was not met.
“It was clear the DA anticipated to win because it did an unusual thing and stayed in a meeting for more than an hour. The DA usually leaves the meeting after the required 15-minute delay,” said the councillor.
In a statement released by the municipality, it stated that the meeting was adjourned because it failed to meet the quorum.
Municipality spokesperson Msawakhe Mayisela said the municipality stood by its statement and declined to to comment on allegations of the ANC’s disagreement over who should be deputy mayor.
Graham said her party learnt that the ANC was not seeing eye-to-eye over who should be appointed. She said the ANC councillors were locked in their caucus and did not enter the meeting.
Further, she said in terms of rules, once the meeting was delayed for over 15 minutes it became illegal to continue with it so her party asked council Speaker Weziwe Thusi to postpone it. Graham confirmed that she was going to contest the position.
“I heard that they did not agree over who should be deputy mayor and I think they feared they would fail to control the outcome of the vote,” said Graham.
Nyawose denied that it was his camp that collapsed the meeting and said he did not know what happened because he was at work as he was not a councillor.
Attempts to get a response from the ANC regional leadership were unsuccessful but ANC provincial spokesperson Nhlakanipho Ntombela said the province would only comment after receiving the report from the regional task team.
Daily News