– but residents will still vote ANC
under 4 000, strangers stand out in Pofadder. Especially those who venture from the main N14 highway as it heads from Pretoria to the Atlantic Ocean.
It splits the town into the older southern section, with wide streets and homes on big stands, and the northern section, with RDP homes squashed together on small plots.
Pofadder’s residents elect people to two of Khâi-Ma’s four wards. It is one of the few municipalities in the country to use a first-past-the-post electoral system, instead of the usual one of proportional representation. This creates a council that is currently split into four ANC representatives, two Congress of the People (Cope) representatives and one Democratic Alliance representative.
That council was called to account by the standing committee on public accounts last year. Several irregularities were cited, including the council not meeting for three years. People in Pofadder say that this in effective stopped any business from happening. The standing committee noted that much of Khâi-Ma’s administrative work had been taken over by its parent body, the Namakwa District Municipality.
Improvements since then, cited by the municipality, are mostly on the surface. Electricity poles line the mostly dirt streets of Blyvooruitzicht — Ward 2 of Pofadder. A few of those streets are tarred, and some are being paved with bricks.
In the ANC’s election pamphlet, it says its provincial leadership has delivered renewable energy projects and the Square Kilometre Array (the multi radio telescope project), as well as refuse collection and clean water.
Those pamphlets are handed out at the party’s one-stop shop, an understated home packed with pamphlets, computers, telephones and stacks of dirty dishes. More of the pamphlets arrive during the cold but sunny day, delivered by the eager team driving a South African Communist Party bakkie. The sticker on its door showing its affiliation is no bigger than a postcard, but the team keep referring to each other as kamerade (comrades). Each pamphlet drop is accompanied by langarm dancing with the team manning the booming speaker system at the ANC headquarters. The base is out; the treble dominates. Every time someone walks past, a dancer seizes the microphone and exhorts “Viva, ANC, Viva!” Few respond.
One of the less interested passersby, Klaas Adonis, is in need of someone to share his anger with. “There are no jobs in Pofadder. You don’t have to ask anybody, just look,” he says. A truck driver, he helped supply solar panels to the billion-rand industry that has brought some income to these parts.
The KaXu Solar One concentrated solar plant is 30km from where he stands. His was part of the hundreds of temporary jobs this industry brought. He now has no job. Despite his red pants, he intends to vote blue next week: “This, now, is little change. Life never gets better in Pofadder. The Democratic Alliance can do better, maybe.” He is one of Pofadder’s few people who does not intersperse his sentences with expletives such as “poes”.
The DA wants to move into the vacuum created in the Khâi-Ma municipality by the collapse of Cope. In the last local elections, the party came from nowhere to get 28% of the vote, and the DA came third with 13% of the vote. This changed in the last national election, when the DA gained Cope’s share. Voting trends in the past two decades show that the ANC nearly always does the same. It is their opposition that comes and goes, from the New National Party to Cope and now the DA.
In Pofadder it seems what the opposition does is immaterial. This is a town, and a municipality, that stay loyal to the ruling party. Most of the people in Pofadder say this is not an issue of service delivery (all the trees have rubbish impaled on their thorns because refuse collection is haphazard at best) but one of power and patronage.
“Everyone knows who you voted for so you cannot take a chance voting for another party. You might lose out.”
The speaker is like many others here — they openly speak about life and their difficulties. But their eyes dart about and they lower their voices when talking about the status quo.