By Naadiya Adams

The City of Johannesburg has a new mayor, elected on Friday after the sudden death of former mayor Jolidee Matongo earlier last month in a vehicle accident. Former member of the mayoral committee for environment and infrastructure services, the ANC’s Mpho Moerane was elected unopposed.

In an interview with Radio Islam, the Mayor said top of his list is service delivery and reconstructing the fractured power supplied by Eskom.

From planned power cuts to unexpected outages, the Johannesburg grid has been under severe pressure for many years, as a result of aging infrastructure alongside a lack of bill payments and high levels of theft and vandalism.

Eskom’s electricity supply has been a point of contention for a long time, in various areas like Diepsloot and Orange Farm, the Mayor says they plan to negotiate with Eskom to have the City take over the electricity supply in areas that Eskom supplies. Migration talks with the power utility have been underway for some time now according to the Mayor.

Moerane has also set his sights on the municipalities problematic billing system, which he says is a matter he wants to have sorted come end of November.

“We are installing smart meters for both water and electricity and we believe that the integration will help us to make sure that our billing sent out to our customers is accurate. We should be starting with a new system in the next week or so, it is my focus,” said the Mayor.

Moerane also plans to have a clean-up of the “crime and grime” in the city. He says Pikitup rubbish removal vans are cleaning up in three shifts a day yet the city remains dirty.

“We have to deal with crime, we have to deal with undocumented illegals, we have to deal with huge buildings that have units  … in the CBD you have a building with over two hundred units yet they only have five bins, you have to ask yourself where are they throwing that rubbish, they throw it on the street,” says Moerane.

He believes the implementation of by-laws will help alleviate the problem. More Johannesburg Metropolitan Police will monitor the city as any form of littering in the street will be strictly prohibited.

Political Career

Moerane had been involved in politics from as early as his high school years and was a Congress of South African Students (COSAS) member. Cosas, an anti-apartheid Student Organisation established in 1979 in the wake of the June 16 Soweto Uprisings in 1976 in South Africa, was the movement that sent him into a career of politics in his hometown of Alexandria.

Moerane details how he became part of the African National Congress (ANC).

“When the ANC was unbanned, I formally joined the ANC around 1992, I became a branch member, then I became a treasurer of the branch, then I rose to become the chair of the branch … I am now the regional treasurer of the ANC. I do serve of the National Treasurer’s Committee of the African National Congress,” explained Moerane.

With less than a month to local government elections, Moerane’s tenure as Mayor may very well be short-lived. Sworn in just last week, he says he is accelerating projects already started by his predecessors both late Executive Mayors, Councillor Geoff Makhubo and Councillor Jolidee Matongo.