Lessons from Schweizer Reneke
23 January 2020
The recent by-election for the town council of Mamusa, which includes Schweizer Reneke, has several lessons for the parties that contested the election.
The election took place because the previous ANC-dominated town council was deemed by the North West Provincial Government to be guilty of maladministration and corruption. According to a report by Baldwin Ndaba of The Star, the North West government petitioned the Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma and the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) in October last year to dissolve the council due to corruption and maladministration. It was alleged that ANC councillors and officials were fighting over municipal tenders and contracts. That council was dissolved and new elections were called for all the wards and, of course, the proportional representation councillors.
On 12 January 2020 the SABC reported that, “The municipality was dissolved last October. The provincial government cited the collapse of service delivery and financial mismanagement as reasons for the dissolution.”
In the election on 15 January, the ANC was returned to power with exactly the same number of councillors as it had before the dissolution. The dismal lesson of this is that in the rural areas, the ANC can rule or misrule as badly as it likes, with corruption, mismanagement, lack of service delivery, a breakdown of services, and yet it can rely on its supporters to return it to office. Those rural voters, among the most deprived in our country, vote ANC, irrespective of how they are treated by the politicians.
A second lesson is that none of the councillors who caused this situation have been expelled from the ANC, let alone been charged criminally or even held personally liable for their maladministration. It is safe to bet that none of the municipal officials have been disciplined or fired or charged for their misdeeds. There are no consequences for the guilty.
The former official opposition in the council, the Forum for Service Delivery (FSD), was totally wiped out in the election, proving that in local government there really is no place for so-called non-political citizens’ movements. The political parties will continue to dominate.
The EFF proved in the election that it has a certain viability, improving its number of proportional representational seats from two to five, all at the expense of the FSD. It failed to win any wards, even with the disastrous showing of the previous council.
The DA lost its one ward to the FF+ but won the FF+ PR seat on the Council. In doing so, the DA demonstrated that it has not regained its 2016 level of support but it has stabilised the party at the level of the General Election in 2019. It has a lot of work to do to regain lost support in the Afrikaans community and while it showed that it had some loyal support in every ward in the municipality among black voters, it is sobering to think that most black voters do not see it as offering a viable alternative to the ANC, however poor its performance in government.
John Steenhuisen is leading from the front and he and his team must demonstrate that the DA is not consumed by pointless factional in-fighting and has policy answers that make sense to ordinary people, black and white. The DA says it is the only major party standing for the values of the constitution, valuing each individual and every population group equally. The DA lesson: Now prove it. Esoteric arguments about classical liberalism do not resonate in Schweizer Reneke.
Douglas Gibson is a former opposition chief whip and a former ambassador to Thailand. His website is douglasgibsonsouthafrica.com
