Mayor Gwamanda confident of running Johannesburg successfully

Newly appointed Johannesburg Mayor Kabelo Gwamanda says he is confident in his abilities to adequately run the City and ensure that service delivery is efficiently rolled out.

The Al-Jama-ah councillor was voted in as Joburg mayor last week, after garnering the majority of votes. He was contesting against DA’s Mpho Phalatse and ActionSA’s Funzi Ngobeni.

Gwamanda was speaking earlier on Thursday, during an exclusive interview with the SABC.

“There is no doubt in my ability firstly to hold office, secondly to keep this coalition together for as long as I have to. Because I have been given a responsibility by the collective, it is not myself who went around and requested that I want to be mayor. They came to a determination to say that I would be suitably qualified to lead the City in the trajectory that we desire as a collective.”

Meanwhile, he says his administration has already begun working on a plan to stabilise the City’s finances to ensure that service delivery is a top priority.

Gwamanda says he will ensure that citizens needs are put first.

“We are in the process of working on a financial plan. It is one of the 11 strategic objectives as the government of local unity because without the proper finances in place we cannot deliver to our residents and we cannot advance any service delivery agenda moving forward. We have to find mechanisms like for argument sake capital expenditure projects. We need to redirect those, some of which are not service delivery related, to those that are service delivery related like infrastructure such as power stations, we need to prioritise those.”