Cape Town - With a mischievous, partly self-deprecating laugh, Patricia de Lille drew attention to a sign behind her desk which reads: “I like to do all the talking myself; it saves time and avoids arguments.”
Sometimes, she said in a post-election interview on Friday, visitors to her office found it quite intimidating.
“And some of them say, That’s true!’
“I don’t mind criticism, and I like debate.”
But there were conditions, the victor in this week’s hard-fought metropolitan poll insisted: “Debate the facts, not perceptions.”
And it was the realities of South Africa today, she believed, that underpinned the choices voters had made, in the Western Cape as much as elsewhere in the country.
De Lille begins her second term as mayor with a resounding endorsement from voters and, she said, a conviction that “we will have to work harder - time is not on our side”.
Service delivery
Rapid urban growth as a result of urbanisation had put “tremendous pressure” on infrastructure and, in conjunction with sticking to the city’s “tried-and-tested” programme, a restructuring of mayoral committee responsibilities would see a sharper focus on service delivery in her second term.
In the modern world, cities were the key agents of change.
This was true globally, where more than 70 percent of the population lived in cities, and it was true for South Africa.
“Cities will determine the growth of the economy, and the change in our country.”
And Cape Town was demonstrating the potential.
It was the DA’s “flagship, the best-run metro in the country, with clean governance, no corruption, creating conditions conducive to economic growth and creating jobs”.
And this was what had “resonated with the rest of the country”.
De Lille said it was gratifying to recognise South Africans were beginning to perceive the “visible difference between Cape Town and ANC-controlled municipalities” and “if you want to bring about change, the only way you can do it is by voting”.
The DA’s offering was that “we are eager to come to your cities and do the same in Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane and Johannesburg”.
It had been brought home to people “the value of the vote is to vote for change”.
While in the grant-dependent rural areas, voters were still prone to ANC “patronage”, the change of heart in metropolitan centres represented “a turning point in the history of our country”.
“After 20 years we have succeeded in bringing the ANC below 60 percent for first time. Now we are ready to go for 2019 to bring the ANC below 50 percent nationally.”
Two cities
With barely concealed impatience, De Lille dismissed perceptions of a DA-led Cape Town as a “racist tale of two cities’” - a popular characterisation of the inequality divide in the Peninsula.
“Well, it’s a lot of rubbish, absolutely rubbish and lies. And if anybody still asks me that now, I will ask, Where do you live? Have you not heard that the voters have spoken?’
“If that had been the truth, voters would have punished us. Instead the support has grown. I don’t care what these detractors are saying. Most of them weren’t involved in the Struggle against apartheid and when they say that, they’re insulting me. I fought in the Struggle for this freedom, and for them to come and assume the DA would do that under my leadership, I would tell them where to get off.”
To “repeat the myth” about Cape Town being racist, she said, was “too easy”, the result either of “laziness or lack of ethics”.
“There is something called Google now - and if you google the most unequal city in South Africa and the world, you will find the UN-Habitat report says it’s Joburg.”
The “allegations” about Cape Town had no “basis in facts”, and she was determined to take this narrative “head on”.
“To get a two thirds majority would not have been possible if we did not get black, coloured, white and Indian voters”. The DA was “the most diverse party in South Africa”.
Beyond this was the risk of getting bogged down in history.
Designing the future
“It’s so easy to get stuck in the past. Yes, we must honour and remember the past, but elections give us the opportunity to design our future and we put a plan for the future before voters and part of that plan is addressing and redressing imbalances of the past.”
Nobody was asking about other cities - huge disparities, for instance, between Sandton and Alexandria (common to all South African cities) - or noticing “when the ANC governed Cape Town it was not (called) a racist city”.
It was “disingenuous to single out Cape Town”, and one had to wonder if it was simply because it was “the only city being governed by the opposition”.
In contrast, the “strong message of all voters in the Western Cape is that it is better together; we want to be united in our diversity and to take our province forward”.
“That’s the narrative that’s developing, and whoever wants to believe otherwise is just lazy. They must go and read.”
Too often, De Lille said, organisations that endorsed the racist-Cape narrative were being influenced by people “whose ideological leanings are with the ANC and who use their institutions to express their personal leanings to make those kind of allegations”.
De Lille was every bit as forthright about why the ANC was losing ground.
“The ANC has never really acknowledged that what the liberation Struggle produced was a constitution and certain levels of government... and they have forgotten they are in government and they have to take responsibility.
“It’s easy, as in the days of liberation, to just depend on talking about apartheid and all of that.
“So you hear, today, the ANC language is still liberation language, but they are forgetting they are in government and have to take responsibility.
“Voters have said, Now listen, you must accept you are responsible; you claim to be the liberators of yesterday, but you are the oppressors of today, because you are corrupt, you are stealing money from the poor to whom you are supposed to deliver services, the fruits of democracy are being tasted only by the few who are tenderpreneurs or people appointed into positions they shouldn’t be in.’”
The ANC “abuse the trust of people ... and it’s not easy to rebuild once people don’t trust you anymore”.
As for the DA, De Lille said, “we are going to work damn hard to prove the point with voters that it can be done, you can have a clean government, you can get clean audits, you can deliver quality services without having to manipulate tenders and you can create conditions conducive to creating jobs”.
And she was “excited” South Africans had “accepted that they can use the vote to bring about change”.
Race, De Lille believed, “is no longer appealing to voters”.
“You are talking to a new generation.
“The ANC doesn’t even realise there’s a generational change happening. That message might still resonate with its older support base, but we have passed that era in our history.”
Port Elizabeth
At an operational level, De Lille revealed she had visited Nelson Mandela Bay a “number of times” to advise new incumbent Athol Trollip on the testing business of “how we govern, what systems to put in place”.
She and provincial premier Helen Zille had been “working with them” for the past eight or nine months.
“We will be giving assistance as far as we can at a political level,” she said.
Equally, she and Zille would “be able to assist” the party in the tricky business of negotiating coalitions.
“We have experience of running coalitions. It’s not easy to manage,” she said, adding, with a laugh, “It’s like a marriage.”
Although minority government was do-able, “it is better to go into a coalition to get the 50-plus-one majority that’s necessary to pass a budget, for instance.
“And this is the legislative requirement for other things, too.
“So we will assist colleagues in other metros on how to manage this.”
De Lille said while she had “always been concerned about the violence projections of the EFF, we will see now, once they get into government, if they tone down”.
A potentially sobering factor was that much of what the EFF had promised voters could not be done at municipal level because it was outside the purview of local government.
Regarding ideological incompatibility, De Lille said: “At the local level, it’s about issues and there’s very little ideology.
“When you are poor, landless, when you don’t have proper services, poverty knows no political affiliation, so ideology really comes second. It’s the values you espouse, and the values in the constitution, that determine finally the outcome of being a good and clean government.”
Weekend Argus