ANC to go for candidates with skills and merit, not popularity – Ramaphosa

The interviewing of councillors and mayoral candidates is the future under the ANC and the process has begun for the upcoming elections.

This was announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa, who also indicated that the ANC was moving away from appointing or selecting councillors based on popularity.

Instead, the party had begun to consider merit and skills.

He said those elected must ensure clean, efficient and corruption-free service delivery and must be “people of integrity” who had the necessary qualification to serve the people.

To this end in the lead-up to the 1 November local government elections, the ANC had begun to interview its mayoral candidates in an effort to ensure it entrusted competent and capable people with this important responsibility.

This practice was being institutionalised and standardised and would continue after the upcoming poll.

“We need to ensure that senior officials, especially municipal managers and chief financial officers, are suitably qualified and subject to more rigorous qualification criteria in order to be appointed.

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“There must be more consistency in applying discipline and consequence management both to recognise and learn from good performance and to correct poor performance,” said Ramaphosa.

Addressing a Cosatu central committee gathering in Johannesburg yesterday, Ramaphosa appealed to tripartite alliance members to unite and avoid public squabbles that would divide society.

Initially the alliance, which comprises the ANC, Cosatu and the SA Communist Party, demonstrated unity at the start of the Covid pandemic by working together to develop a comprehensive response to the social and economic challenges.

However, the pressures of the lockdown restrictions and internal divisions caused cracks.

Meanwhile, North West, Western Cape and Limpopo provinces had been identified as ones with largest number of complaints of irregular candidate selection for the 1 November election.

The ANC vowed to investigate all cases.