Cape Argus E-dition

Fritz to contest DA interim leader post

TSHEGO LEPULE tshego.lepule@inl.co.za

THE DA’s acting Western Cape leader, Albert Fritz says he will be putting his name in the hat for the position of interim leader.

In 20 days the DA Western Cape’s provincial executive committee will host a council meeting where top of the agenda will be the election of an interim provincial leader to replace Bonginkosi Madikizela, who resigned last month. And so far it looks like a two-person race.

MPL Wendy Philander has also expressed her willingness to stand as a candidate once nominations are opened.

Another decision to be taken by the committee is the nomination of a candidate who will be deployed to the Western Cape legislature to occupy a seat vacated by Madikizela, who also resigned as an MPL and MEC for Transport and Public Works.

Responding to a question from the Weekend Argus, Fritz confirmed he would be contesting the position.

The DA is expected to soon send out calls for nominations of candidates wishing to contest the position.

“I will be making myself available for the position as I need to assist the DA to continue on the road to stability,” said Fritz.

This came after the party’s Masizole Mnqasela, who contested the position of leader and lost to Madikizela, said he would be supporting Fritz’s campaign.

“It is extremely important to place the party first ahead of our own individual interests. We cannot afford to be inwardly focused and have bruising contests at this point but rather focus on outside customers, and that is our voters,” he said.

Whoever is elected to the position will stand as interim leader until the party holds its provincial conference, which may not be any time soon given that the last conference was only six months ago.

This week, responding to oral questions in the legislature, Premier Alan Winde said he requested his legal team to look at ways to incorporate a “qualification-verification” mechanism into the province’s lifestyle audits as he could not commit to spending the provincial government’s money on qualification audits.

Winde was responding to a question from the EFF’s Nosipho Makamba-Botya who asked whether the provincial government would be embarking on a screening process to verify qualifications of members of the provincial cabinet in the wake of the Madikizela saga.

“One has to go back and say when you do a lifestyle audits, do you do other audits as well?

“I know that Honourable (Cameron) Dugmore has asked a question of qualifications of the members of our cabinet, and we will get people to sign off of those qualifications and we will submit it to Honourable Dugmore.

“If we need to put those into other processes like the lifestyle audit, then of course we need to do that.

“The point of whether we spend money now to do a review on those qualifications, then I can’t say yes or no.

“But how do we bring this into the future in a mechanism that adds it to the lifestyle audit ... and we will have a look at that?”

However, on Thursday, DA leader John Steenhuisen declared that a full audit would be conducted of the CVs of MPs and MPLs from the 2019 elections, as well as the candidates for the coming local government elections.

This week news broke that Mayco member Xanthea Limberg was among DA members who did not complete her degree.

METRO

en-za

2021-05-09T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-05-09T07:00:00.0000000Z

http://capeargus.pressreader.com/article/281767042099123

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