Face-off best route

I WAS surprised to hear that mayor De Lille had focused on me in my absence at the Cape Town Press Club. It is, however, rewarding to know that I have made enough of an impression on her to keep her focus on me. She had also spent much of her mayoral addresses in chambers directed at me during the past five years, when she should be speaking about the social injury of our communities.

Given that the mayor has such a desire to denigrate me in public, I would like to give her a real chance to do so. I am inviting the mayor to a public debate on the City of Cape Town at the Cape Town Press Club.

This would give us an opportunity to ask the mayor why she panders to rich developers over lunch in Camps Bay, but wears a gas mask when she goes to visit the people on the Cape Flats, and why her five years in office have seen a deepening of racial divides inequalities in Cape Town. Why has the tale of two cities become more entrenched, with more deaths on the Cape Flats linked to criminals and gangs under her watch?

We could also examine the role of the mayor in the 5 percent support that the ID had in Cape Town, when she was its leader. This may be more of a reflection of the people of Cape Town’s confidence in Patricia de Lille than the DA vote in elections in 2011.

Patricia de Lille had flagging fortunes in the ID, and jumped to the DA to save her political career. She has now become the foster child for defending the apartheid advantages of those who benefited, and who want to maintain those generational advantages through the DA into the future at the cost of black communities.

The debate could happen anywhere, any time, and I will be there so we can tell the people of Cape Town why the city looks the way it does. This is a city with no ability of the leadership to lead the oldest municipality in South Africa, with the most resources, onto a trajectory that benefits all Capetonians, and all the features of a community with greater social cohesion. Tony Ehrenreich