Parties rush to submit lists of poll candidates

Monday is the deadline for political parties to submit candidate lists for the municipal elections to the Electoral Commission of SA.

The DA will announce its five mayoral candidates for major cities today, with finance spokesperson Geordin HillLewis tipped to take the position in what remains a stronghold for the party, Cape Town. The GOOD party, headed by former DA mayor Patricia de Lille, announced that member of the Western Cape provincial legislature Brett Heron will stand as its leader in the city.

Candidates for the cities of Tshwane, Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Bay, where coalition governments could again come into play, will be key for all parties.

The ANC does not usually make known its mayoral candidates before voting.

The party held an extended national executive committee meeting on Saturday to finalise election lists, which are always a heated and often violent process in ANC branches.

GO-SLOW

As the ANC staff are on a goslow over unpaid salaries, the party is under pressure to meet today’s 5pm deadline.

Tuesday will be an important day for public servants and the Treasury when the Constitutional Court hears the dispute over the third leg of the threeyear wage agreement, which was due to be implemented in April 2020.

Citing strained finances and unaffordability, the government reneged on the deal, with the result that public servants did not receive an increase for 2020/2021. Should the Constitutional Court rule that the Labour Appeal Court was incorrect in condoning the government’s action, the government will have to stump up increases of between the consumer price index (CPI) and CPI plus one for the 2020 year.

This will mean that not only will the government have to find about R40bn for backdated pay, but the baseline of the public sector wage bill will rise about 5%, putting the fiscal framework seriously out of whack and making debt consolidation targets difficult to achieve.

RUSSIA

Deputy president David Mabuza will answer questions in the National Assembly on Thursday. Mabuza, who is seldom seen in public, recently returned from a lengthy trip to Russia for medical treatment. He will no doubt face questions on who footed the bill for his travel and stay in Russia, which the government is yet to clarify.

The medical team of former president Jacob Zuma was expected to file a detailed medical report to the high court in Pietermaritzburg on Friday explaining his inability to appear before it on corruption charges 10 days ago. Should there be a dispute over the report and whether it justifies Zuma’s nonappearance, the state will be permitted by court order to appoint its own medical team.

Security forces said at the weekend that they would be on high alert this week after the circulation of “inflammatory messages on various social media platforms” over the past week.

The messages call for a national shutdown today and are similar to those that preceded the events of early July, in which the police were unable to control looting and violence by thousands of people, responding to calls for chaos after the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma.

MABUZA, WHO IS SELDOM SEEN IN PUBLIC, RECENTLY RETURNED FROM A LENGTHY TRIP TO RUSSIA FOR MEDICAL TREATMENT