Johannesburg - The much anticipated Johannesburg council meeting which was scheduled elect a new mayor has been postponed to December 4, after political parties disagreed on voting procedures.
The three biggest political parties in council, the ANC, DA and the EFF, all put forward their respective candidates for the mayoral position which was left vacant by Herman Mashaba on Wednesday, who also resigned from the DA last month.
The ANC has put forward its regional chairperson and former MMC for finance Geoff Makhubo, while the DA put forwarded the current MMC for finance and its regional chairperson Funzela Ngobeni for the position.
The EFF, despite having only 30 of the 270 seats in council, also nominated its regional chairperson and caucus leader Musa Novela for the position.
The ANC and the DA have 122 and 103 respectively.
Council speaker Vasco da Gama said if there were three or more candidates, the candidate with the lowest number of votes would be eliminated from the race, which meant that the EFF’s Novela was likely to be removed the contest if councillors towed party line.
Other councillors however disagreed with Da Gama, who decided to shortly adjourn the sitting and then decided to postpone the election of a new mayor to next week after councillor failed to find one another.
“This is very dangerous route we are going on and therefore I really need to take a decision on this and my decision is that we postpone this to the 4th of December to deal with the quarterly reports and this election of the mayor,” Da Gama said.