PAC has plans to move Joburg from dysfunction back to glory days

Thami Ka Plaatjie wants to transform Joburg townships into business hubs while improving service delivery and municipal management. Pan Africanist Congress of Azania stalwart Thami Ka Plaatjie is the party’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg, determined to replace a culture of excuses with a culture of results. With a clear action plan, he aims to make it “a world-class African city”. Ka Plaatjie acknowledges the scale of the task but remains confident in his ability to drive transformation. LIVE interactive map, latest news, multimedia and more! View Map Central to his vision is job creation: turning townships from labour dormitories into hubs of manufacturing and small business enterprise. He also proposes youth teams of qualified and apprentice plumbers tasked with repairing leaks across Johannesburg. What is your plan of action to change Johannesburg? The PAC has five delivery pillars: professional administration; housing and inner city renewal; repairing water, sanitation, electricity and roads; making Johannesburg a hub of manufacturing and investment; and putting people back to work. We will prioritise competent leadership, disciplined financial management and preventative maintenance. Townships must become centres of enterprise and employment, not labour dormitories. Our manifesto is practical and measurable – Johannesburg must be judged by results, not promises. What difference will you make in the city? The biggest difference will be restoring accountability and delivery. Johannesburg has talent, but it is wasted through poor deployment, weak infrastructure management and patronage. Under my leadership, appointments will be based on competence and integrity. We will reduce reliance on consultants, strengthen engineering capacity and use procurement to support local manufacturers and small businesses. I want a city where bills are accurate, potholes are fixed, traffic lights work, water flows and young people are employed to maintain their communities. What has troubled you most about the city? The collapse of basic services, especially water and sanitation. Families wake up unsure if taps will run, while businesses struggle with unreliable electricity and broken roads. How will you solve this? We will restore engineering competence, enforce financial discipline and introduce consequence management. Ageing water infrastructure will be replaced, reservoir projects prioritised and rapid leak detection brigades deployed. Wastewater systems will be rehabilitated to meet Green Drop standards. Youth water brigades will employ plumbers to repair leaks citywide, while artisan teams fix potholes, streetlights and traffic signals. Performance agreements for officials will be tied to delivery targets. What kind of coalition partnership will your party enter into? We will cooperate with parties committed to professional administration, clean governance, infrastructure rehabilitation, inner city renewal and job creation. Agreements must set clear priorities, measurable obligations and transparent mechanisms. Appointments must be based on competence, not patronage. In the first 100 days as mayor, what would you change? A six-month audit will identify vacancies, backlogs and weaknesses. Senior officials will be given performance targets, with urgent water leaks and infrastructure issues prioritised. We will audit abandoned and hijacked buildings for urban renewal and housing, engage partners on technical training and fix billing systems to ensure timely payments to small suppliers.