Former ANC Johannesburg regional chair and current City of Johannesburg Executive Mayor Dada Morero says he has long since moved on from the party’s December 2025 regional conference, where he was defeated by current Deputy Mayor Loyiso Masuku.

“I’ve moved forward long ago. As you know, I even issued a statement accepting the outcome and I moved on because I’m one individual who cannot remain aggrieved or angry,” he said, during a Mail & Guardian podcast interview this week.

“This is not my organisation; it is not my property. If it was my property, it would have been a different story. So we move on. We continue to work for the organisation.

“We were lucky that some of us remain part of that rare generation of the ANC that always puts the ANC before our own personal interests because that’s how we were trained. That is why I moved on immediately.”

He insisted that any disputes arising from the conference remain the responsibility of the ANC’s national executive committee, as all complaints were lodged with the party’s provincial and national leadership.

Following the conference, Morero wrote to the provincial leadership expressing his dissatisfaction with the process, while his supporters also lodged their own complaints.

The fallout deepened divisions in some ANC circles, with Morero’s supporters alleging they were being purged by those aligned with the conference victors.

Morero’s supporters claimed this was evident during the councillor candidate selection process, alleging that those aligned with the current regional leadership were emerging as the successful candidates.

“The ANC is a big organisation,” he said. “There will always be contradictions within the ANC. But the ANC attempts to put regulations in place to help us deal with those issues.

“You know that we have been undertaking a process to elect councillors, which is a branch process. The ANC has guidelines to avert situations where those who are in political power at the time undermine others.”

Morero added that the party’s processes were intended to protect the integrity of both the organisation and its members. “So we do go through that process.”

Following his defeat at the conference, Morero was redeployed by the ANC to its provincial task team, where he was appointed to head a committee responsible for holding mayors accountable.

However, concerns were raised at Luthuli House over a potential conflict of interest, given that Morero was himself serving as Johannesburg’s executive mayor.

He was subsequently removed from that role and now oversees legislature and governance in the province.

“The leadership of the ANC then decided that perhaps my skills and expertise were still required and they appointed me at the provincial level with two tasks: first, the execution of the election campaign, and second, preparing the provincial ANC for its provincial conference next year,” Morero said.

“My responsibility is to assess the performance of the provincial government, the performance of the legislatures and ANC caucuses across the province, as well as governance in all municipalities in Gauteng, so that we can produce a provincial report that supports the work of the provincial and municipal governance structures.”

Morero said he was working well with the regional leadership and met with them whenever necessary. He said he met them on Monday, where they agreed on a governance report that he would formally hand over before holding a follow-up meeting.

“Then we’ll have a follow-up meeting where we’ll unpack the governance report, what it means and where we are.

“It’s part of the ANC’s processes that we all signed up for, so we cannot now come back simply because we were not elected into leadership and start saying this and that.”

Asked why South Africans should vote for the ANC in the upcoming local government elections, Morero said the party’s record of transforming the country should not be overlooked.

The ANC, he said, remained committed to improving the lives of previously oppressed and marginalised South Africans despite ongoing challenges.

“Yes, there will be challenges, many of which are budgetary in nature, that affect the issues people experience every day.

“Whether it’s sewer problems or water issues, people see them daily. They also see and feel unemployment every day. Once the liberation movement can implement better interventions to address unemployment, many of the complaints people have about the ANC will lessen because the biggest challenge we have in this country is unemployment.”

Morero argued that the ANC needed to work more closely with the private sector to create jobs, saying this would help address many of the grievances voters had with the party.

He also appealed for another mandate in next year’s local government elections, arguing that Johannesburg was already recovering after what he described as disruptions following the 2016 elections.

“Then give us another mandate for the next five years and you’ll see that within two years we will be able to account for what we have done. We will be able to demonstrate the improvements we have made.”