Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis on Friday threatened to share evidence which shows that senior leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) begged him to intervene, to cancel the Stormers rugby game scheduled for Saturday at Cape Town Stadium and replace it with the ANC’s January 8 celebrations taking place this weekend.
IOL has reported that the 113th ANC birthday celebration will be taking place at the small Mandela Park Stadium in Khayelitsha on Saturday, where President Cyril Ramaphosa will be delivering his keynote address. It will also be one of the smallest birthday celebrations in over a decade for the ANC.
Hill-Lewis insists that when the ANC failed to secure the Cape Town Stadium, the party lobbied him to secure Athlone Stadium as an alternative but also failed to secure the venue as it was already booked for the Kaapse Klopse Carnival.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) mayor insists the ANC had no initial intention to host the landmark event at the Mandela Park Stadium in Khayelitsha.
“It is a fact, they did not want to go there, they wanted Cape Town Stadium, when that was not available, they then tried to book the Athlone Stadium as a second option. That is also booked this weekend. This is a very busy events time in Cape Town, this is our busiest season. Events venues are booked up literally six to eight months and sometimes even a year in advance. To come in November and try to book a venue is extremely late notice,” Hill-Lewis told broadcaster Newzroom Afrika on Friday.
He said in November and December, ANC bigwigs started calling him on the phone, and sending him WhatsApp messages, asking him to intervene to secure a stadium for the ANC to host its January 8 celebrations.
“I went and checked my records and the last conversation I had was on December 5, 2024, with ANC office bearers calling me and WhatsApping me asking me to intervene and change the booking at Cape Town Stadium. Firstly, I would never just cancel someone who has paid for a booking. That is not how we work in Cape Town. Some of them were friendly, they were saying please can you help. Others were saying is this the city and the DA trying to stop us having a rally in the stadium. That was said to me directly,” he said.
“I was generally trying to be helpful in December. I was trying to help them get the venues and that is why we found the Khayelitsha venue for them. If they carry on lying in public, then maybe I will have to share some of the receipts, as they say.”
Hill-Lewis has saluted ANC chief whip in the National Assembly Mdumiseni Ntuli for being honest on what transpired around the Cape Town venue.
The mayor said the stadium in Khayelitsha has a seating capacity of 2,000 but if the fields are utilised, the venue could host near 20,000 people.
"The confusion is that there is a very small grandstand there. It is not a stadium per se. It is a sports field with a grandstand. The grandstand can only sit 2,000 but I presume they are gonna fill up the fields as well. I think they will get close to 20,000 if they fill up the fields as well. The capacity will be somewhere around 20,000," Hill-Lewis told Newzroom Afrika.
Irked by Hill-Lewis’ assertions, member of the ANC’s national executive committee, Mzwandile Masina told the news channel that the Cape Town mayor is grandstanding about the stadiums issue.
“I am shocked as a former executive mayor that a mayor is now responsible for booking of the halls and stadiums. It is quite ridiculous on his part, and I am not sure really what cheap political point he is trying to score here. He is not responsible for the ANC decision-making in terms of where we go and why we go there,” said Masina.
He insisted that the ANC, after suffering the “strategic defeat” in the May 29 elections, resolved to hold its January 8 celebrations in the township, to reconnect with its voters.
“I can confirm that it was an ANC decision, that having suffered the strategic setback of losing elections, we need to find a different mechanism to reconnect with our people. So, because in the main, our people you find them in Khayelitsha, Nyanga, Gugulethu, Philippi and townships like those, a decision was made by the leadership that we need to take this event where the communities are and we need to stop this thing that we do from time to time, we said we are not going to be bussing any member of the ANC coming from other provinces, given the fact that we have had some unfortunate incidents of accidents,” said the former mayor of Ekurhuleni.
Masina said because the January 8 celebrations are a national event, preparations are handled by officials at ANC’s Luthuli House headquarters in Joburg. He said Hill-Lewis must reveal the national office bearers of the ANC who contacted him and requested assistance to secure a Cape Town venue.
“Ask the mayor to give you the name of the national official or person who called him because he seems now to be an administrator of the halls and stadiums. From the ANC in Luthuli House, ask him in November and December as he says, he will not give you a name because there is no such person who ever called him. This is a national event, it is not a provincial event,” Masina told Newzroom Afrika.
“If he has got fans in the province or in the region that talk to him for this reason or the other, it is not the African National Congress at Luthuli House.
“We have enquired before we came to this interview from Luthuli House, and we have no record of any person who was officially sent by the ANC to book the stadium, either Cape Town or Athlone. That is why I am saying, maybe the mayor can assist us to tell us that Mr so and so from Luthuli House called me and they could not succeed for these reasons,” said Masina.
The Western Cape has been a stronghold for the Democratic Alliance since 2009, after the ANC lost the province to the then opposition party.
IOL this week reported that ahead of the main event on Saturday, a series of ANC events are taking place across Cape Town, including at Robben Island where the party held a wreath-laying ceremony for the ANC’s late leaders.
This is the place where some of the party’s apartheid activists including the late former president Nelson Mandela were detained.
Taxi ranks and churches are some of the places that the ANC leadership will visit in an effort to revive their image in the streets of Cape Town and the Western Cape.