Coalition agreements must be made public, says Tshwane mayor

Newly elected Tshwane mayor Randall Williams says South Africa must rethink the way coalition governments are run as the country will have more of these going forward.

Williams retained his mayoral position in Tshwane on Tuesday as no other nominations were submitted by any other party in the city.

The African National Congress (ANC) lost the City of Johannesburg, City of Tshwane and City of Ekurhuleni to the DA, with the help of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and ActionSA.

DA’s Mpho Phalatse was on Monday elected mayor of Johannesburg, with 144 votes, beating the African National Congress’ Mpho Moerane, who received 121 votes.

This after its councillor Vasco Da Gama was, earlier in the day, elected speaker with 147 votes.

The DA may face difficulties going forward as they were given these votes by other parties without any coalition agreements in place, with DA federal council chairperson Helen Zille indicating that she was not celebrating too much.

On the party’s victory in Tshwane, Williams said he had no idea what was going to happen as no party had clearly indicated who they would support for the mayoral race.

He said he was “shocked” to find that he was the only one running for the position, dismissing accusations that political parties had ganged up on the ANC.

“I had no idea what was going to happen because there is no coalition agreement yet. We haven’t even signed a formal agreement with the FF Plus yet. So everything up until this afternoon was uncertain. So I don’t know about this thing of ganging up, there’s no ganging up,” Williams told the media following his win.

He said, however, that parties needed to sign coalition agreements that would be publicised in an attempt to maintain stability in the city.

“Negotiations are continuing. There must be signed coalition agreements and these agreements must be made public. We will continue to pursue. As some said in the IEC that maybe we must rethink that politicians are given two weeks to put coalitions together. We are going to have coalition governments and we’re going to move more and more towards coalition governments and we need to amend our legislation to make provision for that. I believe here in Tshwane we’ve learnt a lot. Going forward we need to sign firm coalition agreements, but the two weeks we had did not give us enough time to form these coalitions. We stated that our door is always open to most of the political parties.”