The Johannesburg metro will be highly contested again during next month's municipal elections with three main political parties – the DA, EFF and ANC – vying to win the jewel council by an outright majority.
This week, Sowetan spoke to DA mayoral candidate in the city Mpho Phalatse about how she intended to deal with some of the burning issues if elected as mayor.
Inner city renewal and regeneration
The inner city has been marred by a state of decay which has become a stumbling block to eradication of criminality, attraction of investments and provision of affordable human settlements.
The city’s 2007 Inner City Regeneration Charter projected that dilapidated and hijacked buildings would be eliminated by the ANC-led government by 2015, but there has been very little progress in this regard.
Phalatse says the DA implemented some of the ANC’s strategies on dealing with inner city problems. “When we came in we looked at some of the good strategies that were already on the table and improved on what was good and continued with them,” Phalatse said.
In 2017, an audit of about 500 bad buildings within the city revealed that 134 were hijacked, with 24 of those belonging to the city. Phalatse said the DA-led coalition after the 2016 municipal elections managed to reclaim 154 buildings and handed them over to owners and the private sector for low-cost housing before being ousted in 2019.
She said the party plans to push for devolvement of policing to local rather than national level and ensure joint co-operation between the Johannesburg Metro Police Department (JMPD) and the SA Police Service to enable an integrated police strategy for all areas where crime remains rife.
She promises to increase JMPD officers by 1,500 as part of investing in public safety. “People are asking for increased police visibility. In profiling the city, we will have a sense of the types of crimes that are prevalent in the various areas and the type of policing that is required. It is not every area that requires armed police force,” she said.
Phalatse says there is already infrastructure in the hands of the private sector, including existing CCTV cameras whose data could assist in increasing public safety.
Human settlements and land invasions
Phalatse is adamant that the absence of transparency of the housing waiting list has compounded the housing backlog, adding that the crisis of land occupations was complex and marred by criminality.
She says while the DA would push for the wide rollout of serviced sites to residents in need of housing, it would wage war on land invasions.
“Between 2016 and 2019 we saw more land invasions under our then mayor Herman Mashaba because the EFF was driving these land invasions and our mayor was pandering to the EFF even though the DA caucus was strongly against the invasions,” she says.
Unemployment and economic upliftment
Phalatse says the DA will ensure ease of doing business and revitalise different areas of the city that had been abandoned, including factories, where potential investors would be allowed to operate and create employment.
She says the party was planning to top up the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) grants from the national government. “We had already started getting city departments to set aside some of their own budgets to supplement the EPWP grants so that we provide more opportunities,” she said.
Emergency services
Phalatse, a former MMC for health in the city, says her administration will apply for its own ambulance licence for the city after ambulance services were migrated to the province.
“There has been a shortage of fire engines and that is why people’s houses get burnt down to the ground. We put in place quite a large fleet before we left the city but they are still inadequate, we still need more capacity and we will scale it up if we come back and ensure that each fire department has all the fleet and equipment necessary,” she said.
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