ANC needs to pick its best candidates for election campaign

President Cyril Ramaphosa, in his capacity as ANC leader, was in town on Monday in what the party termed a service delivery programme.

He brought with him most of the party’s national working committee — which included deputy president Paul Mashatile and several cabinet ministers.

The visit was the first in a series of visits the ANC’s top echelons hope to embark on over the next few months.

Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the NWC’s meeting with the party’s structures in the Nelson Mandela Bay region, Mashatile said their main reason for coming to Gqeberha was “to support our structures on the ground to address challenges of service delivery”.

This, he said, was in line with the party’s focus this year, which is fixing local government.

Members of the NWC then spread across Gqeberha throughout the day to see for themselves challenges faced by the city with regard to water, electricity and general infrastructure maintenance.

However, it will not be lost to observant readers that this high-powered visit comes just months before the next general elections and that the Nelson Mandela Bay metro is one of those municipalities that are expected to be highly contested with no outright winner at the end.

We cannot fault politicians for being true to their nature, using the opportunity to kick-start an election campaign.

But we hope that, even in all the campaigning they would have done as they visited different communities, Ramaphosa and his team would have seen for themselves the struggles confronting communities across the board in the metro due mainly to a dysfunctional council.

Even though in party regalia, we hope they were able to put on their different hats as government and thought deeply about what the city will need to recover.

As a political party, the first step they can take is to ensure that they select only the best within their ranks in the city to run for positions as ward councillors and PR councillors in the next election.

Without a high calibre of councillors emerging from all major parties, the city will not stand a great chance.

Hopefully, the president and his team would have also used the period to assess the current mayor and her team to see if they would really be the best the party can put forward as faces of the rebuilding project come the November elections.