A chance to find out where we are going

It’s election time. Houses are will be handed over to weeping families, babies are about to be kissed and political jokes … political jokes get elected. DA leader John Steenhuisen, when he’s relaxed and among his people, likes to remind them of how science is increasingly using politicians in laboratory tests because there are some things that rats just won’t do.

It feels strange to be about to vote. Life has changed so much under Covid. But the 2021 local government election is just six weeks away and today is the last day to register. It can be hard to grasp what is at stake. Is this what being at the bottom of the hole you’ve dug feels like?

This will be no battle for the soul of the nation. It won’t be about our past or our future. Local government is in such crisis in SA now, perhaps particularly after the July mayhem, that we are voting simply to stay afloat.

But in a hundred ways our core rights as citizens depend on municipal services. The water. The electricity. The roads. The parks. The litter. Under apartheid, nowhere was the racial divide clearer than in the quality of services between white and black communities.

Twenty-seven years later, under the ANC, nowhere is the calamity of its inability to right those wrongs more clear than on our streets. We are filthy, broken and corrupt.

That this is primarily the fault of the ANC is beyond doubt, though now and then you might come across a municipality run by it that works. Lady Grey in the Eastern Cape was for many years a good example — spotless and contented. I no longer visit, but the ANC in the town co-opted key municipal personnel who knew how the town worked — where the pumps and light bulbs were.

Mostly, ANC municipalities have been run by whichever faction runs the country. In my home town, Mthatha, a bright young black woman was brought in as town engineer during Thabo Mbeki’s presidency. By all accounts she did well. When Jacob Zuma toppled Mbeki, the whole municipality changed hands and the town engineer was replaced with someone’s hopeless cousin.

The ANC cannot handle detail and drudge. The DA, on the other hand, is campaigning almost entirely on detail and drudge. It can, it promises, “get things done”. In the Western Cape that quality is obvious. By and large, it is a way better manager than the ANC.

The problem for the DA is that the vast majority of the country has always been so badly run and neglected (by the ANC now and the apartheid authorities before it) that it cannot conceive of stepping outside a home onto a clean tarred road with no rubbish lying around and a bus arriving more or less on time.

The DA’s weakness is that it does not have a broad economic call to action. Punting detail and drudge to people with very low expectations is a slog.

Probably just as well then that the party is challenging the call by the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) to allow parties to register candidates beyond the original deadline.

The IEC has interpreted a decision by the Constitutional Court to disallow a long election delay as sufficient grounds to allow (principally) the ANC to finish selecting candidates, which it had, not surprisingly, failed to do in the allotted time.

There is fierce debate about who is right. If the DA challenge in the Constitutional Court succeeds, the ANC will not be able to contest in about a third of the country. The DA has taken heart from a decision by the court not to hear oral argument in the matter. The ANC might be equally cheerful about that. Who knows? The court could rule in the next few days.

Politics is ugly. I am distressed by Steenhuisen’s opposition to Covid vaccination mandates and I hope the DA administration in the Western Cape ignores him. But unlike your average lab rat, Steenhuisen is playing to a portion of the electorate that believes Bill Gates is re-programming their mitochondrial membrane structures with every vaccination.

For those of us not magnetised to the fridge, we go to the polls on November 1. In a way, it wouldn’t be the same without a full ANC list even though the IEC has badly damaged its credibility by bending over backwards to interpret the Constitutional Court decision on timing as a pass to reopen nominations. Even former senior IEC officials disagree with it.

Either way, our politics are, I suspect, about to convulse. I haven’t yet seen a poll I trust but I can’t wait for the results already. We need to know where we’re going.

Local government is in such crisis in SA, perhaps particularly after the July mayhem in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, that we are simply voting to stay afloat