Trollip ‘will survive’ yet again on Thursday

The meeting between the highly fractured 61-member opposition in Nelson Mandela Bay ended just before 10pm on Wednesday night after being called in a last-ditch effort to iron out their differences ahead of Thursday’s planned motion of no confidence vote against mayor Athol Trollip.

The result of the heated encounter is that the kingmaker party, the Patriotic Alliance (PA), decided not to vote against DA executive mayor Athol Trollip, who will thus remain mayor.

Earlier, the ANC, African Independent Congress (AIC), United Front (UF) and United Democratic Movement (UDM) tried to make peace between the PA and EFF after the EFF called the PA a party of “thugs” and “unrepentant fraudsters” last week.

Some of the parties, particularly the United Front, were unhappy that the EFF unilaterally declared they would not be supporting the outcome of a vote they lost at their own offices in Braamfontein. In that vote, all parties except the EFF had supported the PA’s councillor, Marlon Daniels, to be the next mayor, while the EFF supported the UDM’s Mongameli Bobani on Tuesday last week.

The PA last Wednesday said they were prepared to withdraw their candidate as mayor – but confusion about what the way forward would be in a possible post-Trollip government once again placed the outcome on a knife-edge.

PA leader Gayton McKenzie said after the meeting: “The AIC, PA, UF and ANC couldn’t agree with the EFF and UDM about the senior positions in the metro. The PA shall therefore not support the motion, thereby making it a failure tomorrow.”

He sent a note to his members saying that “heated debates happened; AIC, UF, ANC wanted to know why the decision to have Marlon Daniels of the PA as mayor was changed. They wanted to know which meeting changed this decision. There were extremely unhappy. The meeting ended when the EFF said that they shall never vote with the PA. The PA said that they cannot work with people who don’t trust them. It will be like crossing a river on the back of a crocodile.”

It’s understood that in an effort to keep to an earlier agreement with the PA, the DA will most likely be passing a motion to reinstate the position of deputy mayor in the city, and will nominate Daniels for the post.

Daniels had earlier said that the opposition’s meeting was called to discuss the “one-sided” fight of the EFF towards the PA, which was all that stood between Trollip’s survival or ousting.

Other factors such as one ANC councillor who was expected to have to return to prison and another who was in hospital this week with a serious medical condition would no longer have had a bearing on the outcome. The ill ANC councillor is apparently out of hospital, or was to be out of hospital by Thursday, while the ANC’s Bongo Nombiba was taking his appeal attempt for his conviction and sentence on fraud and money laundering straight to the Constitutional Court.

He is also likely to be in council on Thursday to vote despite Trollip’s agonised appeal to have him thrown back in jail.

The Citizen earlier spoke to United Front councillor Khusta Mtsila, who insisted that their meeting was meant to ask the parties to return to their original agreement that Daniels should be the mayor, with Bobani as his deputy.

“There was a process,” said Mtsila. “The national leaders sat down and agreed after the vote. That was changed overnight. Who changed that? In which platform?

“If you are in a setup like ours where the majority has taken a position, you need to abide by the decision of the majority.

“If we don’t do that then we are already starting on the wrong note. So we will be insisting tonight that we go back to what was originally agreed at the EFF’s headquarters.”