It may be peaceful, but a battle is on
There are 12 parties on the ballot of the small municipality of Prince Albert in the Great Karoo. Seemingly perfect and with a clean audit in hand, what is in store for the area after the November local elections? By
The municipality of Prince Albert has never seen a service delivery protest. Crime is almost nonexistent. The municipality is one of a rare few to receive a clean audit. It’s a place where neither the ANC nor the DA holds ultimate political power – and the local government elections are likely to be the most contested yet.
Erica Pienaar has one of eight permanent jobs in the village of Klaarstroom in the Great Karoo. “There’s five permanent workers for the municipality. One for the guesthouse. Two for the hotel,” she says, counting them off on her fingers.
Of the three towns that make up the municipality of Prince Albert – Prince Albert, Leeu-Gamka and Klaarstroom – this is the smallest.
Pienaar (36) is lucky in more ways than one. Not only does she have work, but her job in the municipal library comes with air conditioning – no trivial matter in an area where temperatures routinely surpass 40°C. There is no swimming pool for locals.
On a blisteringly hot day in Klaarstroom recently, almost every resident to be seen was wearing orange overalls and engaging in some form of manual labour: sweeping, shovelling or wheeling construction materials around.
It gave the village the strange air of a prison colony, but the overalls are the trademark of the government’s Community Work Programme (CWP), which, together with the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), provides low-paid, temporary work contracts that seem in no small measure to be keeping places like Klaarstroom alive.
In the nearby town of Prince Albert, there is more tourism and potentially more opportunity. But Klaarstroom residents laughed and shook their heads when asked if they would move there, as if emigration to a foreign country was being suggested.
“They have their way to do things, and we have our way,” was how Pienaar put it.
A visit to this part of the Great Karoo is – like so many places in South Africa – an exercise in contrasts. The mainly coloured, Afrikaans-speaking locals eke out livelihoods through piece-work on the farms or the temporary government infrastructure contracts. Their dusty townships abut the wealthier areas where whites own increasingly expensive real estate, a substantial portion of which serves as holiday homes.
Despite an unevenness of resources, things are peaceful here. Prince Albert Mayor Goliath Lottering told us that, within living memory, the town had never had a service delivery protest. The municipality received a clean audit for the 2019/2020 financial year.
The scenery is heart-stirringly beautiful; the sky unimaginably wide. But even here, politics intrude. With only a week remaining until the 2021 local government elections, the battle is well and truly on.
Lottering is a big man who exudes unflappable confidence and a sharp intelligence. For two consecutive local government elections, he has emerged as the single most important political figure in Prince Albert Municipality. A former teacher at Prince Albert Primary School, Lottering founded a political party in 2010 called the Karoo Gemeenskap Party (KGP), which has performed well enough in the last two elections to serve as kingmaker in the municipality and win Lottering the title of mayor.
“People trust us,” Lottering said simply. Canvassing local residents for their views of Lottering, people were polite but reserved.
“He is a good man but he has his faults, like all of us,” one said. Another commented that he appreciated Lottering’s passion for community sporting projects.
Indeed, politeness appears so ingrained in this part of the Karoo that even Lottering’s political opponents could not be drawn into harsh criticism on record. This is despite the fact that in July 2020 Lottering committed one of the ultimate acts of political treachery.
After the 2016 elections, the DA had three of the seven council seats, and the ANC and Lottering’s KGP two seats each. Lottering went into coalition with the DA and, for four years, this appeared to be that rare example of a municipal coalition that works well.
But in July 2020 Lottering broke the coalition with the DA and hopped into bed with the ANC – a choice the mayor is unapologetic about. And he makes no secret of the fact that if the KGP is once again in a kingmaker position after the elections, the party will opt again for a coalition with the ANC.
To DA Deputy Mayor Linda Jaquet, though, there is potential trouble afoot if the DA is kept out of the municipality after the elections: “The town is a little scruffier than it used to be; the roads are a little worse. Mostly, we are worried about the financial sustainability of the municipality.” She says there is a skills shortage throughout the municipality, and poor planning for large capital projects.
There will be 12 parties on the ballot here on 1 November. A few are established political animals with a national footprint: the DA, the ANC, the Good party, the Patriotic Alliance. The rest are small local parties, the majority of which – like Lottering’s KGP – have no aspirations of political power outside this municipality.
In recent weeks, purple posters have gone up in the area’s townships, advertising the newly formed United Community Front (UCF). “We don’t like the term ‘party’. It’s a movement,” said North End ward councillor candidate Attieen Arendse, who previously served in local government alongside Lottering but left for reasons which he refused to elaborate out of courtesy. The small group of UCF activists said they had something that no other party could match: a tangible pledge of the most desirable commodity in the Karoo – jobs. One pulled out a cellphone to show a promotional video for a recycling plant which, they said, could be built in Prince Albert by a private investor if only the current politicians would get out of the way. It would provide 1,000 permanent jobs, they said, and this was the offer they were taking door to door.
Around the corner, a group of ANC campaigners were erecting street posters with the help of a ladder. Candidate Marius Hanse was every bit the polished politician, announcing: “It is time that the ANC claimed back some of our small municipalities.”
In contrast to the UCF, Hanse said the ANC would not promise jobs. Instead, they would point to the legacy of Nelson Mandela that had been fulfilled: the number of free schools built, the growing levels of literacy.
Earlier, another ANC campaigner had handed us a sheet of paper containing proposed talking points for party activists canvassing prospective voters.
Its message was quite simple: the EPWP and CWP projects on which so many Karoo residents depend is the work of the ANC government. It was thanks to the ANC government that EPWP and CWP workers continued to be paid their stipends during the hard lockdown. The current R350 Covid hardship grant comes from the ANC government. The social grants come from the ANC government.
The DA’s Jaquet said the major problem with mounting a political campaign in a place like Prince Albert was the vast difference in needs between the “different sectors” – the rich white residents and the poor township residents. For the township, said Jaquet, the hot-button issue of these elections was jobs.
“They want a municipality where there’s no favouritism in terms of jobs, and they don’t just want EPWP, they want proper jobs,” she said.
For the white residents, “people want things to work properly, and for the town to be crime-free”.
Whatever result is delivered by the elections of November 1, one thing is certain: political contenders will shake hands on it politely.
“We are only seven councillors, and we all need to work together in the best interests of the people of the area,” said Lottering.
Gesturing around at the Swartberg mountains, the church spire and the broad, quiet road, Lottering added: “We are blessed in Prince Albert.”