Medical doctor-turned politician, Mayor Mpho Phalatse, plans to use her time in office to rid Johannesburg of the stigma of being a dysfunctional and crime-ridden city | City_Press
If not for her passion to serve the community, newly elected City of Johannesburg mayor Mpho Phalatse might have been an tenderpreneur, doing business with government. However, the qualified medical doctor's altruistic drive led her to venture into politics.
While she did not retract any of the personal opinions she had expressed, she recognised that her statements might have caused confusion regarding the city’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Then, last Monday, Phalatse was herself elected as mayor after the DA received unexpected backing from the EFF and ActionSA for control of the city.
“One of the things I realised when I moved to Johannesburg was that it’s dirty, especially in the inner city. But you can’t blame people for that because it’s not like Pretoria, where you don’t need to walk far along any street before you find a dustbin. I don’t see that in Johannesburg,” she says. “Apparently people own those buckets and make those who need to relieve themselves in them pay a lot of money for doing so. Those buckets are in plain sight of everyone, which is a disgrace. We can’t allow people to be stripped their dignity this way on a daily basis.”
On the issue of crime, Phalatse says her council plans to create an integrated solution by working with the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department and a private law enforcement agency, as well as community law enforcement organisations. “But we don’t want to take over ageing infrastructure – we want Eskom to upgrade it first and then hand it over to us. We also don’t want to inherit the mountain of debt that Eskom’s accumulated over the years because it allowed a culture of nonpayment to grow.”
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