Pretoria - The United African Transformation yesterday held a protest outside Tshwane House while a special council to elect a new mayor was being held.
With placards and songs, the crowd from various townships joined party leader Abel Tau in calling for the Tshwane council not to support the DA’s mayoral candidate, Cilliers Brink.
Tau, who is no stranger to the City’s headquarters, having served as an MMC, said Brink left the council when he was in the middle of a GladAfrica contract scandal alongside then mayor Solly Msimanga.
Surrounded by supporters and police, Tau said the DA brought its preferred candidate who was once a councillor in Tshwane, but he did not finish his term and left the City in a haste when the scandal erupted.
“We know he was the MMC for corporate and shared services; he was the chief architect of GladAfrica.
“And after a seven-year collapse of the City by the DA, which systematically dismantled it, we find ourselves in a situation where the same man is brought to come and finish what they had started.
“We are saying not on our watch. You have seen the situation in the townships, there are potholes everywhere.
“There is sewage running everywhere, street lights that do not work. To make matters worse, when there is load shedding and the lights come back on, they do not come back on in the townships.
“There are serious power failures in the townships but in East Pretoria, they are not being load shed. The excuse is that Wapadrand (power station) will burn.
“There is no load shedding in some areas, but we understand the agenda of the DA, which is to undermine black townships and dehumanise black people to the point where they must legitimise being led by white people, because they believe that black people have failed them,” said Tau.
He said tjat their mission was to strengthen all the ward councillors and proportional representative councillors who would be voting for a new mayor to know that there were communities out there who were watching them and hoping they make a decision in line with their priorities, and not favourable to Brink.
The R12 billion GladAfrica tender scandal took centre stage in the council when Msimanga was still mayor. The auditor-general also stated that the tender was irregular. At the time, about R317 million was spent on the GladAfrica tender.
Pretoria News