SA’s second-largest political party, the DA, will this week elect new leadership as it prepares for the 2024 general election.
The two-day congress will kick off at the Gallagher Convention Centre, Midrand, on Saturday.
It is set to be the party’s biggest congress yet with more than 2,000 delegates expected.
The party will elect a federal leader, federal chair and three deputy federal chairs at the conference.
The DA has been dogged by an exodus of black leaders over the past few years. At the weekend, the DA’s policy chief Gwen Ngwenya announced her resignation after accepting a role to lead Airbnb’s policy and legislative activities in the Middle East and Africa.
DA federal council chair Helen Zille has asked DA MP Mathew Cuthbert, the party’s spokesperson on trade & industry, to step in temporarily on policy discussions.
The DA has also been criticised for its running of Gauteng’s three metros: Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane. The DA’s Randall Williams recently resigned as executive mayor of the City of Tshwane under a cloud of suspicion after the metro could not account for irregular expenditure of R10bn.
The Tshwane metro is still without a mayor after Williams’s replacement and former COPE councillor, Murunwa Makwarela, resigned after it emerged he had forged an insolvency certificate.
Another term
In January, DA councillor Mpho Phalatse was removed as Johannesburg’s executive mayor through a vote of no confidence.
DA leader John Steenhuisen, who replaced Mmusi Maimane as party leader in 2019, wants to serve another term as DA leader and possibly be the person taking the party to the provincial and national elections in 2024, where the ANC’s electoral support is expected to fall below 50%.
With Maimane at the helm, the DA received 26.9% of the vote during the 2016 local government elections, paving the way for the party to take control of key metros such as Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Bay and Tshwane.
However by 2019, internal DA factional politics caused the party’s national and provincial electoral support to slump to 20.77 %, leading to key resignations of its senior leaders such as Maimane and former Johannesburg mayor and now ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba.
Steenhuisen took over as DA leader when Maimane, then the DA’s first black leader, resigned in 2019 over the loss of electoral support from the DA’s core constituency.
Power stations
Steenhuisen is set to battle it out for the DA federal leader position with Phalatse and Lungile Phenyane, who is contesting all the available positions.
The recently appointed electricity minister, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, will this week continue his rounds of Eskom power stations to engage with plant management, unions and staff. Last week, the minister visited several power stations in Mpumalanga before travelling to Cape Town to visit SA’s only nuclear power station, Koeberg.
First on his itinerary this week is the 400MW Palmiet pumped storage scheme in the Western Cape. Later in the week, his visits will include Matla, Komati and Medupi power stations before he ends his tour on Friday at Majuba, Mpumalanga.
Ramokgopa hopes these visits will help government identify critical interventions needed at each of the power stations to improve efficiency. Improving the performance of Eskom’s power stations, particularly the coal-fired fleet, is central to the state’s plans to end load-shedding within the next two years.
As the long Easter weekend approaches, South Africans hoping to enjoy the last bit of summer sun before winter by heading to KwaZulu-Natal’s beaches will be closely monitoring any announcement from the provincial government about possible beach closures.
The eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality disappointed visitors during tourism seasons since 2021 with continuing sewage pollution at popular beaches. The problem became pronounced after devastating floods that affected parts of the province in 2021, damaging poorly maintained water and sanitation infrastructure.
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