ActionSA President Herman Mashaba has vowed that his party will not be used as voting cattle in some frivolous motions of no confidence against the Executive Mayor of the City of Joburg Dada Morero.
Mashaba was referring to a motion sponsored by the Democratic Alliance (DA) to oust Morero from his position.
Mashaba was responding to a question on YOU FM Newshour as to whether they would consider voting with his former party to remove Morero.
“Why must we support something that we don’t know about?
They didn’t even have the courtesy to contact us.
We know that Dada Morero without any doubt is a total disaster in running the city, but as ActionSA we cannot really vote based on a frivolous motion where the DA doesn’t have the numbers.
Do you know how many councillors you need to vote for that motion to pass?
One-hundred and thirty-six, and do you know how many members DA have in that council, 70.
How are they going to pass that motion?” asked Mashaba.
He said he’s also surprised that the DA also wants to remove the City of Tshwane council speaker, Mncedi Ndzwanana, through what he described as “another frivolous motion of no confidence.”
The ActionSA leader accused the DA of disloyalty and failing to fulfil its promises to elect their member as the speaker of the council when they voted for their councillor Cilliers Brink to be the Executive Mayor in March 2023.
He laughed off the reports that DA Federal Council Chair Helen Zille was lobbied to consider contesting for the position of the Mayor of the City of Johannesburg during next year’s local government election,
“Tell me you believe her, anyone who believes that Helen Zille was approached, I can promise you it’s only one person.
I’m confident that one person would pass a lie detector test with distinction.
I am the last person in this world who can believe in Helen Zille,” remarked Mashaba.
ActionSA said during her tenure as the Executive Mayor of the City of Cape Town Zille failed to transform the city and to deliver services equally to all the people of the city.
“The DA was against our decision as the city to take all hijacked buildings and offer them to the private sector.
We made it clear to the private sector unlike in Cape Town that the buildings belong to the people of South Africa and 30% of them must be allocated to poor communities, renting them out at a value of as little as R1000 a month, considering university students and the poor.
Look at Cape Town today, how many black people can afford to live in Cape Town, that’s why the city is the most expensive place where an ordinary person from Gugulethu, Khayelitsha or Mitchells Plain can ever even dream of buying a house anywhere in the City Centre because they can’t simply afford to live there,” said the furious Mashaba.
Furthermore, he said that he lost confidence and respect for Zille working with the Institute for Race Relations (IRR) and approached the ANC to remove him through a motion of no confidence.
“What kind of a person is this?
She is the very same one who deployed Brink to Tshwane to ensure that they provide services to white communities in Tshwane, when they were governing with the support of ActionSA.
When I finally realised that I cannot change these people, I removed Brink and you can remember the outrage and propaganda machinery unleashed against me, but I am so proud today,” explained Mashaba.
Meanwhile, Zille says unlike in many political parties, her party believes in fairness and competition and has lobbied many other candidates to contest internally first for the Chain of the City of Joburg.
She insists that she’s a relevant candidate to turn things around and rebuild the country’s economic hub and restore it to its former glory.
