A prince and a mastermind
Beaufort West’s deputy mayor, Truman Prince, said he convinced the Karoo Democratic Force
(KDF) to leave its coalition with the Democratic Alliance, and partner with the ANC, by creating tension between the partners and then exploiting the fractious relationship. “You must create tension and once there is tension amongst them, then there is lack of communication. When that happens, you must grab that political moment,” Prince told the Mail & Guardian.
The KDF became Beaufort West’s kingmaker after the 2016 elections, when the party secured one seat in the local council, and the ANC and the DA won three each. The party was formed just five months before the local polls out of frustration with the ANC. The KDF’s president and the town’s mayor, Noel Constable, is a former member of the governing party.
During negotiations for power, the KDF struck a coalition deal with the DA — mostly because its supporters expected the party to bring a change to the Beaufort West council by removing the
ANC, Constable said. In return, the DA elected Constable as the Central Karoo district mayor, a more powerful position that placed him in charge of not only Beaufort West but also smaller surrounding towns such as Nelspoort, LeeuGamka and Murraysburg.
But the KDF switched its allegiance to the ANC in February and formally broke with the DA by unseating the DA mayor, Japie van der Linde, his deputy and the DA speaker with a motion of no confidence earlier this month.
In the same session, the selfstyled mastermind of the new deal, Prince, returned to power in the position of deputy mayor.
Even though the pair had been running the local municipality since February, when Van der Linde was removed, the motion ratified this decision.
This week Prince explained how he had orchestrated the demise of the DA-KDF coalition: “Good preparation before council meetings is critical,” he said. “You must slowly but gradually befriend him [Constable]. You can befriend him yourself, or you can befriend him via someone else …
“You can use the hard and soft technique; I do the attacking and [another colleague] is just doing the pampering,” he added.
“And then, if he reckons I’m going to have a hard tactic, I use the soft one: ‘You know, you’re very good, I must say I underestimated your intelligence,’ and so on.”
Constable doesn’t believe he was duped into joining the DA. Instead, he said, the “arrogance” of the DA’s Western Cape leader, Bonginkosi Madikizela, and the party’s refusal to implement the KDF’s election manifesto soured their relationship. “What was in our manifesto wasn’t really getting priority with the DA,” he said, adding that the DA refused to give local entrepreneurs major contracts. “We need to give them the space and programmes where they can buy their own material and not only subcontract. So, the DA didn’t want to implement that.”
But Van der Linde suspects Constable was co-opted and, if not, is adamant Constable’s ceremonial position as district mayor frustrated him. “He wanted a glorified position as a ‘super mayor’ and he would be in charge of everything. But he couldn’t run Beaufort West when I was mayor and he was in the district,” Van der Linde told the M&G. “When we had a crisis of water, we got funding from different sources … and he was not happy because we had tenders that we didn’t give to his preferred companies.”
Constable admitted he was frustrated in the district mayor’s office, with no access to major projects — specifically, the drought relief funds that were allocated to the struggling municipality as its water resource dried up almost completely. “Sitting there for me was sometimes frustrating.
The district doesn’t have money, they don’t have projects; like the municipal infrastructure grant … It was good sitting there, but then if we want to be a force, we need to be closer to the people,” he said.
Although Van der Linde and Constable wouldn’t credit Prince for his political prowess in returning the ANC to lead the council despite losing the election in 2016, both of them were “politically groomed” by Prince.
Constable said that Prince had been his high school teacher in Beaufort West and was the first person to teach him about politics and resistance during apartheid, whereas Van der Linde acknowledged that he enjoys significant support in the community.