Cape Town - Councillors from the City of Cape Town will on Tuesday vote for a new candidate to fill the position of mayor following the stepping down of Patricia de Lille last week.
The ruling Democratic Alliance (DA) had elected to put forward Community Safety MEC Dan Plato as its mayoral candidate and he was duly sworn in as a councillor last week.
However, ahead of the vote on Tuesday which had largely been expected to be a formality given the DA's majority in council, opposition parties the African National Congress (ANC) and the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) announced that they would put forward Xolani Sotashe and Grant Haskin as mayoral candidates respectively.
Both parties said the recent upheavals and bitter infighting in the DA caucus which led De Lille and nine other DA councillors, including DA council chief whip Shaun August, to resign, did not bode well for good and stable governance in the metro and that they would oppose Plato as mayor.
Haskin, who has previously served as deputy mayor, has gone on record as saying that the ACDP does not believe that the DA caucus will be able to unite around Plato.