De Lille doubts she’ll survive as mayor

Patricia de Lille doubts she will remain Cape Town mayor and has little faith in a positive result from the DA’s top brass.

“Given the circumstances‚ I have little faith in a positive result,” she wrote in a letter to the party’s bosses yesterday.

De Lille has submitted the letter to the DA’s federal executive as her final attempt to save her job.

She said she would go to court if she was unsuccessful.

The DA’s caucus in Cape Town effectively ousted De Lille in an internal vote of no confidence last week‚ but the decision needed to be ratified by the party’s federal executive before it took effect.

This came after the party implemented a clause that‚ essentially‚ allowed it to remove office-bearers internally.
De Lille narrowly survived a motion of no confidence in February in which the opposition supported her.

De Lille had until 3pm yesterday to submit reasons why the caucus’s decision should not be carried through.

In her submissions‚ she requested that some of the top party members recuse themselves‚ because of their clear bias she said they had displayed publicly.

They included party leader Mmusi Maimane‚ MP Natasha Mazzone‚ federal executive chairman James Selfe and Western Cape leader Bonginkosi Madikizela.

De Lille said she had no choice but to dispute the allegations made against her‚ because the party did not give her more details about them and the charges that led to last week’s vote. In response to De Lille’s statement, DA federal executive deputy chair Natasha Mazzone said: “The DA will remove members who disobey the high standards of clean and efficient governance which the DA demands.

“We note that De Lille has chosen to make her submissions public and will not allow this to affect the procedures of the federal executive in any way.”

The federal executive meets tomorrow and Saturday to “properly and fairly apply their minds” to De Lille’s submissions before deciding her future in due course. – TimesLIVE