Hill-Lewis votes in Cape Town as DA targets 60 councils
The DA leader cast his first municipal ballot since taking the party's reins in April, and predicted the party would grow from 27 councils to about 60.
Geordin Hill-Lewis cast his ballot at Edgemead Primary School in Cape Town on Wednesday, his first municipal election as leader of the Democratic Alliance, with the party aiming to more than double the number of councils it governs.
As IOL reported on 4 November, the Cape Town mayor voted alongside the DA’s first deputy federal chairperson, Siviwe Gwarube, as a handful of voters moved through the school hall. Hill-Lewis, who was elected DA leader in April, is also seeking a second term as mayor of the city.
At the party’s final rally in Mamelodi, Pretoria, on Saturday, he predicted the DA would grow from 27 councils to about 60. “I voted to take this great city forward for everyone,” he said after voting. “Wherever we govern, we will serve every resident, whoever they voted for.”
He thanked voters who had trusted the party with their vote for the first time, saying the DA would “work every day to earn it”, and urged South Africans to reach their voting stations before polls close at 9pm. “The next five years will be decided by the people who vote today,” he said.
The DA has governed Cape Town since 2006. The latest Ipsos poll, released on Friday, put the party on just over half of the vote in the city, a margin that would leave it short of an outright majority if it held.
Earlier on Wednesday, IEC chairperson Mosotho Moepya said indications were that voting stations had opened successfully “almost everywhere in the country”. Moepya reminded parties that campaigning inside the boundaries of voting stations is prohibited and could carry a fine or up to five years in prison.
For Cape Town voters, the ballot decides who runs the city’s water, electricity distribution, refuse collection, housing allocations and planning approvals for the next five years. The DA’s 60-council target, if met, would put the party in charge of a far larger share of the country’s municipalities than it holds now, and with that a larger share of the delivery failures and budget fights that come with local government.
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