Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen assured South Africans on Monday that the party will grow local economies while he announced the party’s mayoral candidates ahead of the local government elections.

Steenhuisen said it is a duty to let voters know, well ahead of the elections, who will be tasked with running their cities and towns should the DA win in those municipalities, or secure the majority share of a coalition government.

The DA’s mayoral candidate for the City of Ekurhuleni is Refiloe Nt’sekhe, for the City of Tswhane the party elected Randall Williams, for the City of Johannesburg the DA has selected Mpho Phalatse, Nqaba Banga has been selected to run as mayor of Nelson Mandela Bay and Geordin Hill-Lewis has been selected for mayor of the City of Cape Town.

Steenhuisen said his party has spent an entire year on its candidate selection process.

“This has included extensive interviews, practical assignments and assessments by independent panels to get to the point where we can confidently say: These are the people we trust to bring the DA’s vision to life in local government," said Steenhuisen.

He said South African voters deserve a proper government where they get to play an active role all the way up to election day.

“It’s still not too late for this to happen. I’d like to challenge the African National Congress (ANC) to do what we’ve done, for the sake of our democracy. Make this election the open contest it was always meant to be. Put your candidates out there in front of the people, alongside ours,” he said.

Steenhuisen announced that he will personally spend a lot of time with each of these candidates while campaigning across the country.

In his nomination acceptance speech, Banga promised to bring stability to Nelson Mandela Bay.

He said the DA is cleaning up the City and it will do more to keep making progress while taking the City forward.

Steenhuisen said his party can no longer pretend that the total implosion of service delivery and infrastructure in these towns and cities is normal.

“We cannot pretend that it is normal for companies and their factories to have to relocate at great cost and with massive job losses because they cannot be guaranteed the very basics like water, electricity and usable roads. We cannot pretend that it is normal for municipalities to owe water and power utilities billions and billions of rands. We cannot pretend that it is perfectly normal for hundreds of municipalities to rack up billions in irregular and unauthorised spending every year, and to never get a stamp of clean governance from the Auditor General. We cannot pretend that daily protests in multiple communities against an invisible, unresponsive government is normal,” he stated.

Steenhuisen said it was time for the voters to start firing and hiring governments.