These are my priorities — new mayor
Fighting crime in northern areas and townships top of Gary van Niekerk’s to-do list
The new coalition government leading Nelson Mandela Bay will have to hit the ground running this week as they attempt to tackle everything from major service delivery backlogs to corruption and establish themselves as being worthy to be at the helm of the metro.
And fighting crime in townships and Nelson Mandela Bay’s northern areas is newly elected mayor Gary van Niekerk ’ s priority.
Van Niekerk said media houses had become desensitised to the situation and had stopped reporting on the gruesome murder cases in the northern areas as deaths occurred all too frequently.
“From Friday night when I was elected, we’ve been on the ground running and we’re continuing with the efforts of the previous government in trying to get the northern areas working.
“The Northern Alliance wasn’t given a service delivery directorate in the previous coalition.
“We’ve now decided we can’t work with the DA any longer and have obtained the mayoral position.
“It’s important to us to have services delivered to the northern areas and townships.”
In March, crime statistics revealed that nearly 200 more murders took place in the Eastern Cape between October and December compared with the same period the previous year, with New Brighton topping the log for the police station with the most murders.
Van Niekerk became the city’s first citizen on Friday after former mayor Retief Odendaal was ousted through a motion of no confidence when 62 councillors voted for his removal.
This included the ANC (48), EFF (8), Patriotic Alliance (2), Northern Alliance (2), PAC (1) and AIC (1).
The motion was rejected by the DA (48), ACDP (2), AIM (1), FF+ (2), UDM (1), DOP (2) and GOOD (1).
Van Niekerk said it was crucial for the new coalition to get back to basics, which meant getting street lights fixed, potholes filled and repairing water leaks.
“Stanford Road is the road that connects the northern areas and this speaks to exactly what I’m talking about.
“I contacted roads and transport [at the weekend] to have a pothole fixed but we couldn’t see it [after hitting the pothole] because street lights aren’t working.
“But I’m pleased that I can see solar-powered [high-mast] lights going on in Stanford Road which was announced by the previous administration,” he said.
Taking to social media yesterday, Odendaal posted pictures of solar-powered highmast lights going up and wrote that due to millions being lost to cable theft, an official from the electricity department proposed the city install the lights in areas prone to cable theft.
“It is a brilliant concept and I’m extremely proud that this pilot project will see Stanford Road lit up again,” Odendaal wrote.
Van Niekerk said the new government was not happy with how the draft budget was structured and would be arranging a meeting with National Treasury to see if they could reconfigure it and possibly get an extension before tabling it.
The Northern Alliance officially contested the local government elections for the first time in November 2021.
After the 2021 elections, Van Niekerk was speaker in the then ANC-led coalition under former mayor Eugene Johnson, who now returns as the speaker of council following Friday’s meeting.
Newly elected deputy mayor Babalwa Lobishe, who replaces Khusta Jack, returns to the Bay after having served as safety and liaison committee chair in the Bhisho legislature.
Lobishe previously served as political head of economic development, tourism and agriculture before the 2016 local
‘From Friday night when I was elected, we’ve been on the ground running and we’re continuing with the efforts of the previous government in trying to get the northern areas working’
government elections.
She also headed up the sports, recreation, arts and culture portfolio in the Bay under then-mayor Zanoxolo Wayile.
Lobishe is also the ANC regional chair in the metro.
Asked how they planned to keep the new coalition intact after it collapsed in September, Lobishe said strengthened communication and open lines were key.
“What’s different now from before is we have agreed on what we want to achieve, which we didn’t do previously.
“Secondly, we’ve strengthened lines of communication for scheduled meetings and when there’s a need for us to meet, we have open lines for all these parties,” she said.
Lobishe said toppling the DA-led coalition was not a spur of the moment thing, it took months of careful planning.
“With the amount of commitments we’ve seen over the last couple of months ... there’ve been a number of meetings that took place and planning a way forward, and I believe this coalition can last us until the next election,” she said.
She said they had already discussed how to “strategically” fast-track service delivery in townships and the northern areas.
“Services are not there. “The DA-led administration [failed] our people, they didn’t bring services, but we want to bring solutions to the water crisis because we have ambitions of bringing more investment to city, but if we don’t have water this can’t happen.
“Dealing with cable theft is also a priority because the darkness isn’t emanating from a shortage [of electricity] in the grid but from the consistent stealing of cables,” Lobishe said.
“It’s part of what we’ve identified, even if it means putting a tracker on the areas we’ve invested robots in ...
“There are cities with this technology — when people dig around the cables, a device alerts the city and officials react.”
Political analyst Dr Ongama Mtimka said that, on average, it took between six to eight months to have a change of government in the metro.
He said he hoped the ANC-led provincial government would push through with the Section 12 process which would result in the metro’s governance structure being replaced with a collective executive system.
“I don’t think they will do it immediately but maybe three months from now they can reactivate that process and give this municipality another option to explore a path to stability,” he said.
Co-operative governance MEC Zolile Williams gazetted the Section 12 notice in terms of the Municipal Structures Act on December 12.
The move would result in the scrapping of the city’s mayoral system of governance and replacing it with a collective executive system.
Mtimka said by avoiding the mayoral seat, it absolved the ANC — which has the most seats in the current coalition — from being held accountable.
“They don’t have a mayor in the executive mayoral system which creates a situation from which power in local government is derived and leveraged,” Mtimka said.