Al Jama-ah

We need to constitute stable governments, like, and I, I w- in the, when we later on going to make inputs into the coalition government's legislation, we're going to make a very strong submission that can have an agreement that if you have got more than 5% of the vote in the municipality, you should f- constitute part of government, uh, and then proportionally distribute government responsibilities and roles and, and agree that the party which has got the highest number of votes must be the one that is given the executive mayor position and not, uh, smaller parties.

Those things that we did after the 2021 local government elections were chaotic, and I, I, and I was amongst the first to admit that, that those things we did that with, uh- Some coalition arrangement in Johannesburg where we ended up with the Al Jama-ah occupying the position of mayor.

You can't be a mayor when you do not have people behind you.

No.

In Joburg, I mean, that's changed.

We had, I think, two Al Jama-ah wards, two IFP wards, one PA ward.

Um-

See, your screen is, is atrocious.

You know, we have 10 parties out of the 18 in government that only have one seat.

Mm.

And then we have parties with three seats, like Al Jama-ah, who had two MAYORs.

Mm-hmm.

SABC News, independent and impartial.

The battle for Johannesburg is intensifying ahead of the 4th of November local government elections, with Al Jama-ah fielding Ashley Mama as its mayoral candidate.

Mama's campaign is focusing on some of the city's most pressing concerns, including service delivery, accountability, economic development, job creation, and community safety.

With Joburg also facing pressure on infrastructure and declining public confidence in local government, the question is, what can Al Jama-ah, or what does Al Jama-ah believes it can do differently? Ashley Mama joins us to tell us more.

A very good morning to you, sir, and welcome.

Thank you so much for the opportunity, and yeah, good morning to your listeners.

Earlier, we spoke to AfriForum, and they say there must be private, uh, a partnership with the city in order to make it work.

So what can a municipality realistically do to create an environment in which businesses, uh, and employment can grow?

Um, at all levels, these coalitions are gonna be formed.

So if you, and this is, A, an argument for voting for a smaller party, 'cause a smaller party can still tip one of these things, uh, one of these agreements like with Al Jama-ah in, uh, Johannesburg.

But along with that, small parties are gonna be able to, to have an outsized influence on, on voting patterns of these GMUs, GLUs, GPUs, GNUs, um, because they're gonna be able to go, "Well, I'm the swing vote.

I'm the king maker.

And B, it should also mean that when you are researching and potentially engaging with these smaller parties, 'cause oftentimes you can meet these smaller parties, the, the, yeah, their reps, you should ask them who the, who they are willing to vote for and what their non-negotiables are because they will then be able to go, they will then take that position into these conversations with these bigger parties as well.

Totally, and that's also interesting, right? Because now let's talk about what different coalition, uh, uh, what different political parties have done with the opportunity of being in municipal ruling government.

Super interesting, the African National Congress is obviously in the most, but the ANC is quite willing to let other people lead, be mayor, like the Al Jama-ah mayors, if it gets them in power.

Another example is Nosipho Moyo, ActionSA, the mayor of Tshwane, despite not having the most votes, not even close, because the ANC was willing to go, "If it means we can get into the, into bed with the, uh, with the EFF or, uh, whoever," but, but, but the other guys say, "Well, we'll have you in our coalition, but you don't get to have the mayor seat," they will do it.

What's quite interesting, in Ward 60 he's only one of two candidates who actually live in the area.

The other being Shamie Masali of Al Jama-ah, lives in the Sabrant Park area.

R- Rashaad lives in Rondebosch East.

All the rest don't live in Rondebosch East.

They, no, exactly, yeah.

And, and, and they've recognized that actually what they tried to do before actually didn't work, trying to find some small puppet parties to, just such as, uh, Al Jama-ah to run, to try and run the city for them while they sit in the background and actually do the, the heavy lifting.

That didn't work, and people saw through it.

I firmly believe that reason will prevail.

He was MMC for finance.

You know, while he keeps claiming, no, I just came in as mayor now, the other previous mayors, etc., Tapelo Ahmad of Al-Jama'ah, and there was Kabelu Guamanda also of Al-Jama'ah.

But behind that, the man holding the purse strings has always been Dada Morero, daddering around and destroying our city.

To talk about something else now as we come to the end of the show, I mean it's very difficult to hold the narrative that things are improving and that the government is not destroying things.