Where to now for Cilliers Brink after his removal as Tshwane mayor?
Brink was voted out in a motion of no confidence last Thursday, with EFF, ANC and ActionSA councillors heckling and booing him in the chambers and union members ushering him out after the vote.
Hardly a dignified affair for the city housing the seat of national government.
But for Brink, though the motion had far-reaching political ramifications, it simply felt like another chaotic day in the Tshwane council. He tells the FM how his allies in the chamber once had to form a barricade to prevent him from being physically attacked by opposition councillors; another councillor once had his shirt ripped from his back during a sitting.
“I have experienced far worse,” Brink says with a smile, as the dust settled after the vote.
“Taunting us and egging us on is nothing new … Living through that does build up a degree of equanimity necessary to build the trust of voters and the public.”
The City of Tshwane has had a tumultuous nine years: internal ANC battles before 2016; a difficult minority coalition under the DA (with tentative backing from the EFF); non-procedurally placed under administration by the Gauteng provincial government; and a series of three mayors who did not complete their full terms.
Brink’s downfall was engineered by ActionSA, which joined the DA’s governing coalition after the 2021 election.
An initial vote to elect him mayor in 2023 was scuppered by renegade ActionSA councillors, resulting in the election of unrehabilitated insolvent Murunwa Makwarela. The leader of this group of councillors, Nkele Molapo, was expelled by ActionSA in March that year.
The FM has spoken to several people who have worked with Brink since his days as a student activist at the University of Pretoria. He graduated with a law degree and after a brief stint in practice became a DA councillor in Tshwane in 2011.
In 2016, he was appointed to then mayor Solly Msimanga’s executive. This, sources say, was when attitudes hardened against him.
He was behind the novel way in which the council began assigning expanded public works programme (EPWP) jobs — instead of carefully selecting candidates (to dole out political favours), he put in place a recruitment “lottery”, in which an electronic system randomly selects job seekers for particular employment drives.
This was an unpopular move among politicians — including some in the DA — who viewed the EPWP as something that could be exploited for political gain. Some of these councillors remained but others jumped ship to ActionSA in the next local election, sources say, and continued to hold Brink’s hard-line stance on this against him.
Insiders refer to him admiringly in connection with the GladAfrica saga, which involved an irregularly awarded R250m contract; the scandal led to the resignation of then municipal manager Moeketsi Mosola.
“The deal was fishy and even though the DA was in charge at the time, he pushed for it to be investigated. He was prepared to stand on principle on that,” says a source.
In the DA, Brink was crucial to putting together the party’s “Ready to Govern” document for Gauteng before the 2021 election. The document is set to be used again as the DA prepares for the 2026 local government election.
Taunting us and egging us on is nothing new … living through that does build up a degree of equanimity necessary to build the trust of voters and the public
— Former Tshwane Mayor Cilliers Brink
Ahead of the motion last week, he released a detailed statement on how he was turning things around in the capital, including its finances; debt decreased from R5.3bn in April 2024 to R4.4bn by August. Thanks to a rigorous debt collection programme Tshwane collected an extra R1bn in July and August, compared with the same months last year. Moody’s raised its investment outlook from negative to stable in April.
While there has been an improvement in the metro’s performance under his watch, it hardly matters, given that both ActionSA and the ANC say their beef is not with Brink but with his party.
The ANC got a hiding in Tshwane in the election. Support dropped by 10 percentage points, compared with 2019. Worse, this cannot be attributed to the birth of the MK Party, which got only 3% of the vote in the city. How the ANC will turn its performance around before 2026 is unclear.
For ActionSA, it is about one-upping the DA. Leader Herman Mashaba believed that the DA was talking to the ANC about forming a new coalition in the city — so he struck first.
Brink concedes that returning to the negotiating table with the ANC will be tough. Insiders in the ANC echo the sentiment, saying further talks with the DA will be tense, given the way it has cast ANC provincial party structures as “rogue” and “corrupt”.
Should a deal to stabilise the metros fail, Brink will remain on the opposition benches.
“Yes, I’ve made the decision to stay in opposition … In this way I will make sure that whoever governs does not take away what we have achieved in this short time … I will be there to make sure that the politically nonaligned senior managers we appointed are not victimised … We can’t have the ‘re-cadrerisation’ of the city,” he says.
Insiders say Brink is one of a handful of leaders in the DA to keep an eye on as the party heads to its provincial and national elective conference in 2026 — in the aftermath of that gathering, he may have bigger shoes to fill.
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