‘We can no longer be spectators’
Independent candidates look set to play a greater role in the metro municipality after 1 November
For the past decade, civic activist Mervyn Govender has been involved in a war with the ethekwini metropolitan municipality and the cartel of politically-connected tenderpreneurs dominating city housing projects in Durban’s Indian areas.
Last week, Govender secured a court order rescinding the orders evicting seven families from their homes in council schemes, which have subsequently been sold to Section 21 housing companies.
Now Govender plans to take his fight for social justice in housing from the courts to City Hall and is standing as the Forum 4 Service Delivery candidate for ward 49 in Phoenix in north Durban. The forum is also contesting eight of Durban’s 111 wards, mainly in Phoenix and in surrounding areas.
Other independents forums — including the Active Citizens Forum — and standalone independents are contesting the poll in ethekwini.
Durban has four independent councillors on the 219-seat council, which was the only metro retained outright by the ANC in 2016.
The ward Govender is contesting, ward 49, covers unit 7, 8 and 9 of Phoenix, which are home to a number of council housing schemes built by Anc-connected tenderpreneurs, including the late Jay Singh, who sold them to third parties instead of to residents as intended.
The housing developments are the target of a Special Investigating Unit (SIU) probe proclaimed by President Cyril Ramaphosa and largely as a result of the work done by Govender and other activists from the Phoenix Residents and Ratepayers Association, which he chairs.
Govender describes the ward as the “mecca of corruption” in the metro because of the influence of ANC benefactors such as Singh and Roy Moodley, whose companies have dominated city housing delivery in the historically Indian areas.
“I believe that this is the most heavily captured ward in the city,” Govender said. “That’s one of the reasons I’m standing here. We have been fighting corruption in council housing here for the past 10 years.
The ward is contested by ANC candidate Sarojini Govender, Minorities of South Africa’s Ronnie Veeran, Tino Pilay of the Democratic Alliance and Slindile Duma of Actionsa.
Govender is number one on the Forum 4 Service Delivery’s Durban proportional representation (PR) list
“We decided we couldn’t be spectators in this any more. We decided that it was time now to contest council seats because in this community, people don’t have leaders who have the community’s interests at heart.”
Govender said he and other activists had aligned themselves with the Forum 4 Service Delivery because of its stance on social justice and that doing so gave them a better chance of making a difference at council level as independents.
“This is an attempt to fight to clean up the system from within.”
Govender says he will use his council seat — if he is successful — to continue with this kind of work. “We are going to continue to use the court to hold developers to account. Unlike the current opposition, who only react after it is too late.”
He has poured his savings into the campaign, and members raised funds at neighbourhood level. He said the candidates have signed an agreement that half of their council salaries would be put into projects aimed at empowering young people.
He believes the Forum 4 Service Delivery candidates have a chance of success. “We are people who have a history of community activism. People are tired of the parties making promises that they do not deliver on.”
ANC
In 2016, the purge of councillors from the ANC list by Zandile Gumede and her supporters after her election as ethekwini chairperson, led to many standing as independents.
But the ANC, which holds 216 of the metro’s 219 seats, appears to have managed the fallout from tensions over the candidate selection process.
Thabani Nyawose, who heads the ANC’S PR list for the city and is most likely to emerge as mayor after 1 November, said they were happy with how dissatisfaction over candidate choices had been contained.
The party’s most influential region, ethekwini is also among its most divided, with supporters of Gumede and former president Jacob Zuma initially challenging more than 50% of the candidate choices. The radical economic transformation (RET) group has lodged a dispute over the selection of Nyawose over RET faction leader Nkonsenza Shezi as de facto ANC mayoral candidate. The riots in July had created fears in the ANC that Zuma’s supporters would not campaign for the party or back other parties or independents.
The ANC took 56.3% in ethekwini in 2016, but this share of the vote in the national and provincial elections in 2019 dropped to 53%.
“We are confident in the system we have used in selecting candidates with the involvement of the community. We hoped that this strategy would assist us in minimising the emergence of independents from within,” Nyawose said.
Only 25 disputes remain. After the elections candidates who “are not meant to be on the list” would be
removed and by-elections would be held to replace them.
But the ANC was still “gravely concerned” about the killings that had marred the campaign in ethekwini.
In August, three women were gunned down in a drive-by shooting at Inanda while attending an ANC meeting. Last Friday, ANC candidate Siyabonga Mkhize and another man were killed while door-to-door campaigning in Cato Crest in ward 101.
Nyawose believes the ANC can improve on its 74 ward and 52 PR seats on the 219-seat council, and has identified 62 such seats as a “comfortable” target.
Inkatha Freedom Party
The local government poll in ethekwini provides the IFP with an opportunity to build on its electoral gains in 2019, when it replaced the DA as the official opposition in Kwazulunatal. The IFP holds two wards and eight PR seats, having taken only 4.2% of the vote in the city in 2016, but the party believes it can make gains at the expense of the ANC and the DA.
For the first time, it is contesting all 111 wards in the city.
Like the ANC, EFF and DA, the IFP has not named a mayoral candidate for ethekwini and will only do so after the votes are counted, although in each case the candidate topping the PR list is the most likely to take that role.
Elections head Narend Singh said although the party has high ambitions for Durban, it is also being realistic about what it is setting out to do.
“We want to do better in ethekwini. We have no illusions about becoming the majority party in the city, but we do want to have more influence in the running of the city, and to leverage that influence,” he said.
The party aims to double its PR and ward vote in ethekwini and
hopes it will pick up pockets of support in suburban wards where it has never fielded candidates before.
Singh believes the fallout over the DA’S Phoenix poster campaign — “The ANC called you racists” and “The DA calls you heroes” — and the failure of ANC leaders in the province take a stand against the looting in July will translate into votes for the IFP.
Mdu Nkosi, the IFP’S representative on the ethekwini executive committee, said the IFP’S ethekwini manifesto, which targeted issues such as Durban’s billing system, keeping the streets clean and dealing with street crime, had been developed around issues that residents wanted to be addressed.
Economic Freedom Fighters
The EFF is contesting all 111 wards in the metro with a view to building their PR vote in ethekwini, where the party has eight such seats, having taken 3.4% of the vote in 2016.
The EFF is yet to win a ward in ethekwini, but its regional command team chairperson, Thabani Mvubu, says the party will have a greater effect this time around. “Our aim is to take over the ethekwini municipality.”
The EFF has focused on the major townships to the north, south and west of the city and in the central business district and the suburban wards housing the bulk of the city’s student population, where mass registration of EFF student command members took place during the final voter registration weekend.
Mvubu said the city centre wards, Umlazi and Mpumalanga township — where the EFF took 20% of the vote in the by-election in ward 6 in April — were areas that had shown strong growth for the party.
The EFF had not yet taken any hard and fast decisions regarding coalitions in the city.