Rather fix municipalities than slam critics

A man walks through sewerage in Bekkersdal. File picture: Sharon Seretlo

A man walks through sewerage in Bekkersdal. File picture: Sharon Seretlo

Published Oct 17, 2014

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Shooting the messenger won’t stop South Africans from taking their votes elsewhere in the 2016 election, says Max du Preez.

Cape Town - One suspected that the ANC was nervous about its prospects in the 2016 municipal election, but it appears that it has now grown into full-blown paranoia.

I would have thought fixing local governments where the ANC is in power – eradicating nepotism and corruption, putting skilled people in key positions, etcetera – would have been the best way to improve the ANC’s standing among local voters in the 18 months or so before that election.

Instead, the ANC is hitting out at critics and is trying to put lipstick on the pig.

That, at least, seems to be the reaction by the party’s Western Cape secretary, Songezo Mjongile, in his hysterical response to my column on urbanisation and failing local government: “It’s not that simple, Max”.

Mjongile is so hell-bent on silencing his party’s critics he resorts to old stereotypes not reflected in my column, like the accusation that I thought that “Madiba Magic” would have fixed everything and that I pretended that apartheid had left no legacy.

He attacks me for not attacking the DA where it is in power in local government, yet I didn’t spare the DA at all. This is what I wrote: “I live in an area run by a DA local government and I’m very happy with the way I’m treated. But I’m a white middle-class person. I really don’t see the same care being applied to my area’s townships, and they need it more than I do.

“It is probably true that the conditions in townships in DA-ruled municipalities are more under the magnifying glass than those in ANC-ruled areas. It is probably unfair, but it is the inevitable reality. The DA will simply have to live it down.

“It’s not doing that very well right now, especially in Cape Town, and so it is undermining its goal of ridding itself of the stigma of a party that cares more about whites.” Mjongile’s only recognition of this statement was that he quoted me describing myself as a “white middle class person”.

My column explained that cadre deployment, maladministration, corruption and nepotism were not the only reasons for the failure of so many local governments: “Well, there was another reason, at least regarding local government: the rapid and massive movement of rural people to urban areas. Many millions of them. The proportion of South Africans living in urban areas increased from 52 percent in 1990 to an estimated 65 to 67 percent this year, resulting in more than 3 000 squatter camps in the country.”

The ANC cannot be blamed for this phenomenon. But what we can ask the ANC and the DA in the Western Cape is how on earth did they not foresee that an end to influx control and the dissolution of the old homelands would open the floodgates of rural people wanting to move to the cities and plan for it?

In fact, I credited the ANC governments for achieving much, like building nearly 3 million RDP houses. But it didn’t make much of a dent in the backlog as people came streaming in.

Mjongile doesn’t even bother to acknowledge rapid urbanisation as a mitigating factor. He goes straight into Marius Fransman/Tony Ehrenreich mode and blames “mass evictions of farmworkers and farm-dwellers” in the Western Cape for the influx of people into the Western Cape.And yet the population of the Western Cape had increased by some 30 percent the past two decades, overwhelmingly because of people streaming in from the Eastern Cape.

I made the point that a lot of the recent violent protests resulted from the eviction of people from privately owned and state land they had occupied illegally. The government has spent many billions in agricultural land reform, but in every metro in the country there is a shortage of land for urban people to settle on. I asked the question: “Shouldn’t urban land be a much more urgent priority?”

No word on that from Mjongile.

The legacies of the apartheid era impact heavily on local government. No doubt about that. Mjongile seems to be an expert on my writings. How did he miss an entire chapter in my latest book, A Rumour Of Spring, on the continued massive impact of colonialism and apartheid 20 years into our democracy?

But how much of an excuse is that for the fact that only 17 out of 278 municipalities received a clean audit from the auditor-general since 2010, Mr Mjongile? Here’s his take: “The lack of service delivery is a symptom of a complex structural issue.”

Go and tell that to the people of Msinga municipality, where only 18.6 percent of households received basic services and only 2.2 percent had piped water. Or the residents of Ndwedwe, Mandeni and Umdoni, where less than 3 percent of residents use formal toilets. Please Mr Mjongile, go tell them: “Blame complex structural issues for your suffering 20 years after liberation, comrade.”

I held out hope in my column, saying the energetic new Minister of Co-operative Governance, Pravin Gordhan, is determined to clean up and professionalise local government and should be supported in his endeavours.

No, says Mjongile, Gordhan is merely part of a collective that wishes to improve matters. “What the ANC, as part of this collective, calls upon is for, among others, journalists, like Du Preez, not to take cheap shots and feed into ANC bashing as if all will be well once the ANC goes.”

The voters in at least two metros and many other municipalities may well decide in 2016 that it was time for the ANC to go. Shooting the messenger won’t stop them from taking their votes elsewhere.

* Author and journalist Max du Preez writes a weekly column in the Cape Times.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.

Cape Times

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