Back in June I received an email which told me about an online vote for the Best Mayor on the Planet. I was pleased to see that our very own Cape Town mayor, Helen Zille, had made it as a finalist: in the top 50 out of 820 mayors around the world.I went onto the World Mayor website and saw that out of those 50, there were only 3 from Africa and of those three, 2 were from South Africa!
• Omar El Bahraoui, Rabat, Morocco
• Helen Zille, Cape Town, South Africa
• Amos Masondo, Johannesburg, South Africa
Helen Zille, who also heads up the Democratic Alliance (our country's opposition party) received votes and support from all around the world. One of my favourite quotes; as it sums up her efforts in an eloquent nutshell is:
"Helen Zille runs probably the most sensitive and challenging Unicity in the world, yet has done so in a friendly, professional, compassionate manner, using her outstanding leadership and inter-personal skills to hold together a fragile political coalition and deliver on the promises to ALL the people of Cape."
The final selection was not based on votes alone. This is to avoid bias against countries with a smaller online community. Voters were encouraged to give reasons for their votes and those supporting messages (just like the quote above) together with the number of votes were added together and resulted in the unanimous decision from the judges. The new Mayor of the Year for 2008 is Helen Ziller. As a Captonian, that makes me very proud and very inspired!
Congratulations on a job well done!
For a list of all the runner's up, you can follow this link
And this just goes to show that your vote really does make the difference!! Saffers; don't forget to register to vote on 8/9 November 2008 for our South Africa General Elections in 2009. See the IEC website for details: http://www.elections.org.za/
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