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Kabelo Gwamanda, who has resigned as Joburg mayor on Tuesday, says that he leaves behind a city that he stabilised financially and administratively.
In his statement, Gwamanda said during his tenure, Joburg managed to place good governance on course and achieved the "best audit outcomes witnessed by the city in years".
Gwamanda became the mayor in May 2023.
"...[I] will forever cherish the experience afforded to me in my tenure as the executive mayor," he said.
"My story is one I am hopeful will continue to inspire many an African child from our city that against deprivation, isolation, social and political exclusion and with the absence of friends and peers in the corporate and media hierarchy, one can live and rise on the noble cause of changing the conditions of the poor."
Build One SA (Bosa) said it welcomed the long overdue resignation, describing Gwamanda as a "puppet mayor of Johannesburg".
"This brings to an end a calamitous 466-day period of instability, poor service delivery and general malaise in the country’s economic heartland," said Bosa MPL Ayanda Allie.
"Elected through an agreement between the ANC and the EFF, Al-Jamah’s Gwamanda was nothing more than a puppet mayor — a useful figurehead in which very little de facto power resided — given his party won just 0.20% of the votes in the most recent local government elections. While politicians benefitted, residents suffered.
"Bosa remains cautiously optimistic about the future of the city, and calls on all parties in the council to apply their minds diligently and ethically as they elect a new mayor to take over the reins."
ActionSA, which pushed for Gwamanda's urgent resignation, said it "could not stand by and allow the city to fall further into disrepair".
ActionSA's caucus leader Nobuhle Mthembu said Gwamanda's tenure of just over a year "can only be characterised by failure and catastrophic incompetence, with the evidence of the city's downward spiral evident across Johannesburg".
"Residents of the City of Johannesburg have suffered under a mayor whose ineptitude and habitual blame-shifting, never self-included despite his unambiguous executive responsibility, have led to a disastrous state of service delivery across the city," Mthembu said.
