In the battle for the Nelson Mandela Bay metro, the ANC has made the fight a personal one against the DA’s Athol Trollip, writes William Saunderson Meyer.
Economic desperation is never far below the surface in a country where unemployment, depending on how it is defined, is nudging remorselessly towards 40 percent.
Like hunger in a predator, desperation defines the lives of the estimated nine million looking for work. It causes teachers to kill rivals in competition for jobs being illegally auctioned off by the teaching union.
It is the madness behind the torching of immigrant-run spaza shops. It lurks behind the idiocy of razing clinics and schools to catch the attention of dilatory municipal councillors and officials.
Desperation may be even more compelling in the lives of those who are employed but in jobs that may easily be lost. Think ANC public representatives who will forfeit income and lavish benefits if opposition parties do well in the August local government elections.
Analysts from the Institute of Strategic Studies predict in a newly released study political violence ahead of these elections is set to reach its highest levels since apartheid. Unemployment and a lack of opportunity are at the root of this, but growing violent protests were also “increasingly motivated by dissatisfaction with the ruling elite and governance performance”.
Aggravating the situation were the actions of politicians, traditional leaders and the EFF.
While it is difficult to pinpoint the precise causes of political intolerance, it’s easy to see the result. SA is in for a rough ride over the next couple of months as the ANC pulls out all stops to win big in August.
One of the areas in which the ANC is fighting a nasty battle is Port Elizabeth’s Nelson Mandela Bay municipality. The DA has high hopes of a win there, but have a mountain to climb.
The ANC’s deployed mayor, Danny Jordaan, is popular and has done a good job in clearing up the corrupt, incompetent mess he inherited. And the DA’s Eastern Cape leader, Athol Trollip, who is its mayoral candidate, has all the disadvantages of being a middle-aged white man carrying what in contemporary SA is the heaviest of all political burdens - he is of farming stock. Shudder!
On top of the usual petty harassment of not granting permits for DA marches and pre-emptively booking venues the DA wants to use, the ANC has decided to make this battle an unabashedly personal one.
In February there was a call upon the SA Human Rights Commission to investigate Trollip. It was claimed there was a historical pattern of racism, abuse and exploitation of workers by four generations of the Trollip men on the family farm near Bedford in the Eastern Cape.
The politically motivated nature of the complaint was obvious. It came from ANC councillors and a disaffected DA member who had solicited the complaints and promised the complainants compensation.
Whatever might have happened on the farm between 1914 and 2004, the years that featured in the claim, this could hardly credibly be nailed to the door of Athol Trollip. He had managed the farm for only nine years, before its sale in 2004.
The SAHRC took a month or so to nibble its way through to the obvious, before announcing there was no case for Trollip to answer. Surely the damage to Trollip’s reputation, despite a multi-million defamation claim against one claimant, has been substantial.
This week the Nelson Bay mayoral committee member for safety and security, Fikile Desi, announced another top-level, high-priority, fate-of-the-nation-hangs-in-the-balance, no-holds-barred investigation into Trollip. It seems Trollip may have committed the egregious crime of transgressing the Fire Brigade Services Act.
It transpires Trollip and DA workers driving through the Windvogel part of PE chanced upon three houses in flames. The fire brigade had not yet arrived, so Trollip and pals helped the homeowners deploy hosepipes and ferry buckets, as well as rescue personal possessions. When the fire brigade arrived, it was “extremely professional and efficient”, Trollip said.
But the ANC is not to be mollified. “Members of the public could easily emulate Mr Trollip’s actions by attempting to extinguish a fire without protective clothing and the relevant training”, said Desi, so an investigation is of “critical importance”.
PE voters’ choice in August has been much simplified by this ANC-directed absurdist comedy.
Will they support the party whose provincial leader faces a possible charge under that cornerstone bit of legislation, the Fire Services Act of 1987, which has a maximum penalty of R10 000 if guilty of intentionally obstructing a fire office? Or the party whose national leader has hanging over him 783 charges for assorted criminal acts of fraud and corruption and who, if convicted, faces a maximum penalty a dozen or so years in chookie?
* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
** Saunderson-Meyer’s Jaundiced Eye column appears in Independent Media titles every Saturday. Follow WSM on Twitter: @TheJaundicedEye
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