ANC Dullah Omar regional chairperson Ndithini Tyhido will become a councillor and the party's caucus leader in the City of Cape Town.
Image: File
The ANC in the Western Cape has announced its Dullah Omar regional chairperson Ndithini Tyhido as caucus leader in the City of Cape Town.
This follows last month’s resignation of its former caucus leader Banele Majingo, who dumped the party for the DA.
The ANC’s Western Cape provincial executive committee held a special meeting on Thursday night to deliberate on Majingo’s defection and vowed to defend its integrity, restore discipline within its ranks, and reaffirm its commitment to the poor and working-class people of Cape Town.
The ANC said Tyhido’s deployment as a councillor and leader of the opposition in the City of Cape Town was a strategic decision grounded in its collective wisdom and a reaffirmation that the party’s caucus must be politically led and ideologically grounded.
"This deployment returns the leadership of our caucus to the disciplined structures of the movement, where our revolutionary mandate is anchored.
"This is not a ceremonial appointment. It is a clarion call to organise, to agitate, and to mobilise to build a formidable opposition that speaks not from the chambers of privilege but from the trenches where our people still suffer under an unequal, divided city," the party said.
Tyhido, 52, is the former chairperson of the Khayelitsha Development Forum and has led the implementation of the urban renewal programme advancing development and infrastructure in an area often treated with disdain by the DA-led municipality, which the ANC accuses of governing through exclusion and where the legacy of apartheid spatial planning is not just maintained but aggressively enforced.
The ANC has given him a clear political mandate to challenge the DA-led municipality’s neoliberal and anti-poor agenda and to hold the executive accountable for collapsing basic services and deliberate underdevelopment in black and working-class areas.
He has also been tasked with demanding economic justice, ensuring real inclusion for informal traders, the unemployed, the working poor, and youth, and pushing for radical improvements in housing, water and sanitation, public transport, and safety.
Tyhido must also reignite people’s power by bringing the struggles of the townships into the council chambers and forcing the city to hear the voices of those they exclude, according to the ANC.
loyiso.sidimba@inl.co.za