DA Gauteng leader Solly Msimanga has denied allegations made by former mayor of Tshwane, Randall Williams, around events leading to his resignation in 2023.
Msimanga dismissed the allegations by Williams as disappointing lies that were not backed by any evidence.
Williams on Wednesday made allegations about events leading to his resignation as mayor, alleging he was accosted by Msimanga and that DA leader John Steenhuisen had fired him.
He also alleged that Cilliers Brink, who later replaced him as mayor, was tasked with handling all issues related to service delivery in white suburbs even though he was not a councillor in Tshwane. Brink was a DA MP in Cape Town at the time.
Msimanga told TimesLIVE Premium on Thursday that Williams was lying.
“What Randall has said is factually incorrect and very disappointing in the sense that I’ve worked with him for a very long time,” he said.
According to Msimanga, Williams was not pushed to resign, but the meeting in question was merely to alert him of the options open to him.
ActionSA had made it clear that it wanted Williams to leave office. The party had lobbied the multiparty charter partners who supported their call for Williams to leave.
The meeting with Williams and Steenhuisen was to tell him he could either voluntarily resign or face a motion of no confidence.
“The time he says there was a meeting where he was fired, he was not fired in that meeting. In that meeting John asked him if he was OK with the options that had been presented to him: do you want to go through a motion of no confidence or you’re going to be fired. He said he was going to go, but in his own time,” said Msimanga.
“He submitted a letter that said he was resigning with immediate effect. I then said to him this doesn’t give the multiparty coalition partners time to discuss and put up another candidate, so then we are saying revise your resignation time and make it month end.”
“He then says to us, ‘no, do whatever you want.’ We changed it to month end and then the next thing he says he’s fine and remains as a councillor and doesn’t resign, because if he was fired we would have removed him as a councillor. He remained as a councillor for about four months then he resigned to pursue his own personal interests. Then lo and behold he comes and says he’s now being fired.”
I finally had enough of all the misinformation and tarnishing of my name that I had to endure. If I wanted to hurt the DA I could have raised this issue before the national election.
— Randall Williams
Msimanga said he has WhatsApp messages to this effect.
Msimanga labelled as “absolute nonsense” the allegations that there was an instruction for all service delivery-related issues in white suburbs to be directed to Cilliers.
“I’m saying that he’s lying, and if he’s saying that he’s telling the truth, then he must put out proof that he was told that Cilliers would be representing the suburb or would be raising issues on behalf of the suburbs. That was never the case,” said Msimanga.
Instead, he said, Brink was roped in to communicate with Afrikaans people in Tshwane after polling showed that the Freedom Front Plus was making inroads in that constituency.
“That’s absolute nonsense. Cilliers Brink being Afrikaans, and very proficient in Afrikaans, was asked to communicate because when we did our polling we saw the Afrikaans vote was beginning to lessen in Tshwane given the fact that the Freedom Front Plus was targeting certain areas. Cilliers Brink was never there to deal with any other issue. Remember he was an MP all along. All that he did was to come and co-ordinate communication that was aimed at the Afrikaans vote,” he said.
“If he [Williams] says he was given an instruction to report to Cilliers he must show you a WhatsApp message, a letter, anything that suggests that was the case. It was just about how do we communicate with Afrikaans voters who have said that the DA has stopped representing them. Cilliers was there as a communications person aimed at Afrikaans people.”
Msimanga also questioned the timing of Williams' revelations, saying it was suspect.
“We find the timing very interesting and very questionable. He's been quiet for 19 months, and all of a sudden he’s got something to say and putting factual inaccuracies out there, which is very much unfortunate. He was given an opportunity to bow out because ActionSA was going to push him and he was given an opportunity to bow out with dignity, and this is what he does now,” said Msimanga.
Williams told TimesLIVE Premium that he could no longer take what he claims was misinformation.
“I finally had enough of all the misinformation and tarnishing of my name that I had to endure. If I wanted to hurt the DA I could have raised this issue before the national election,” said Williams.
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