LISTEN | DA will retain Tshwane, says confident executive mayor Randall Williams

Tshwane’s executive mayor Randall Williams cut a confident figure at the Electoral Commission's national results operation centre in Pretoria on Monday.

He is buoyant in his belief that no party will dislodge the DA from governing the highly contested Tshwane metro that he cannot wait for the elections to end so that he can go back and resume implementing the plans he started when he took over in November last year.

Listen to what he had to say: 

During the local government election campaign, several parties were eying Tshwane, which the ANC lost to the DA in 2016 by a small margin. The DA received 43.15% of the votes while the ANC got 41.25%.

“We are cautiously pleased,” said Williams, who was monitoring the voter turnout numbers and waiting for the votes to start trickling in, after the nation voted on Monay.

“I know the status quo of service delivery of every aspect of operations in the city and there have been massive improvements that people can see physically.

“You can physically see whether there are more street lights burning and fewer potholes, so we have concentrated very hard on basic service delivery. We have also changed the way the officials were conducting their business. We accomplished a lot in the past 12 months and people can see the difference.”

Williams said after the elections he is determined to return to office because he has “some unfinished business”.

“When I started on October 31 last year, we implemented a 10-point plan. We were unemployed for eight months while the city was under administration and we knew that we need to come up with a recovery plan for the city.”

After implementing the plan, Williams said that is where he would gauge whether there had been any improvement. “When there is an election, political parties develop a manifesto and in that manifesto they state all of these promises — and these are unrealistic promises and they expect people to vote for them though, since 1994, the ANC made many promises that have never been fulfilled.

“I told the guys that I do not want a manifesto full of promises, we have a 10-point plan that we started implementing in November last year and it is this plan that becomes our manifesto. It is a realistic plan that is already being implemented and one year to implement this plan is not enough. We need a longer period.”

When asked whether the DA’s infamous “racists” vs “heroes” campaign poster would dent the voter numbers, he said: “People in Tshwane will look at what is happening in Tshwane and they think about whether they got service delivery, is the city turning around and what some other guys, that belong to the DA did in KZN, who took their own decision, we were not involved in that decision.

“I think the residents in Tshwane can differentiate between KZN and Tshwane and I believe that the residents can see a new dawn happening ...”

On the ANC’s ambition to dislodge the DA in Tshwane, Williams said he was not intimidated at all. “When you drive around Tshwane, you do not see their mayoral candidate. They are using the president’s brand to gain the city but the fact is that the president is not going to be the mayor of the city. He is not going to be involved in the running of the city, so why are they using the president’s face?”

On new players, like former Joburg mayor Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA, Williams said he was not worried and believed that this will not lead to a decline in the DA vote. “ActionSA has been mostly active in ANC strongholds. No, they are not a threat for the DA.”

On managing the mass exodus of black influential party leaders, Williams said, “This has definitely not dented the black vote. For the first time, we are going to win wards in Mamelodi. So we are building up and our branches are big now and we have some of our biggest branches in Hammanskraal.”

Unlike in 2016, Williams said, the DA was attracting new supporters. “We have struck a balance (in maintaining the conservative and liberal vote). What we are looking to is a middle that is very strong, from the Right wing and the Left wing.  We are focusing on the strong middle and our leader John Steenhuisen has been constant with his messaging that we are a party for everybody. We are a nonracial party and we want to attract everybody who would like to ascribe to our principles, policies and values — they are welcome.”

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