CAPE TOWN — If demographics count for anything – and in a country made infamous by apartheid they’re unavoidable – then the coloured majority in the Western Cape will once again decide who takes Cape Town in 2019. Here veteran journalist and astute observer of politics, particularly in his own Mother City backyard, Ed Herbst, uses his institutional memory to argue just why the ANC, purportedly rubbing their hands in premature glee at their election prospects in Cape Town, have got it very wrong. While Mayor Patricia de Lille’s divisive split within the DA has caused major ructions and reputational damage, the ANC’s dismal historical treatment of coloured people will hold sway he predicts. He sets out historical and some topical examples of exclusive and abusive race-based treatment. The racial card has always come up trumps for politicians in the Western Cape, but the ANC, Herbst argues, has sown disillusionment via it’s African-favouring racial track record down south. The coloured majority has long memories, he warns. – Chris Bateman
By Ed Herbst*
The bottom line for politicians is never patronise the coloured people; never underestimate their ability to play the field; and never undermine their contribution to the struggle for liberation. – Rhoda Kadalie Politicsweb 21 May 2014
The oppression of white and coloured people is unacceptable. Clearly the targets for restitution in the public sector have long been reached and what is happening now is reverse racism. – Anton Alberts Politicsweb 5/6/2018
The recent by-election loss of support by the Democratic Alliance – 9% in Oudtshoorn and 17% in Saldanha – has resulted in generalised media attacks and inspired a phantasmagorical prediction by Yonela Diko the Daily Maverick columnist and spokesperson for the African National Congress in the Western Cape – the extinction of the DA.
As Gareth van Onselen has pointed out with numerous irrefutable examples on his Twitter account, Diko is a serial plagiarist – so far without sanction – in his Daily Maverick columns.
‘I think it now fair to call him a plagiarist, without any reservation, and an unadulterated and shameless fraud’ says van Onselen quote and unquote – but will the ANC retake Cape Town in next year’s general election?
For that to happen, would require in my opinion a complete overnight memory loss by the biggest voting bloc in the city – the Cape Flats community – and if the DA has suffered recent by-election setbacks, so too has the ANC and the tension within the party is increasing.
In April 2016 I laid out the reasons, demographic and political, why I believed that Jacob Zuma’s increasing unpopularity had scuppered the ANC’s chances of electoral victory in the Western Cape.
Shortly thereafter, during the municipal election, I was proved right when, of the 231 wards in the Cape Town municipality, the DA took 66% of the available seats by a margin of 154 wards to the ANC’s 57.
Murderous strife
The combination of the current discord in the DA and Ramaphoria could well decrease DA majorities in a year’s time but the ANC is experiencing its own unique National Democratic Revolution brand of internecine and indeed, murderous strife and, come the 2019 election, the DA will have rid itself of its internal saboteur, Patricia de Lille.
Having seen Peter Marais – part rock singer, part evangelical rabble rouser – work a crowd into a frenzy of enthusiasm on the Cape Flats, I was convinced that he was going to have a significant local impact in the 2004 general election.
He rose without trace.
Of the 20 million people who voted, only 13,000 placed their trust in his New Labour Party – 0.09% of the vote – and he no longer plays a significant role in Western Cape politics.
It remains to be seen whether Patricia de Lille can significantly improve on Marais’ total.
Contestation for high office is an innate part of politics and what we are seeing in the DA now is a re-run of the rivalries which afflicted the party during the time when Lindiwe Mazibuko was playing a divisive role. Believe it or not, the DA survived.
In the meantime the ANC, likewise, is wracked by conflict between the Ramaphosa faction and the Zuma faction.
In the anchor quote to this article Rhoda Kadalie makes a trenchant point – The bottom line for politicians is never patronise the coloured people…
Specifically forbidden
Censorship by omission is the stock-in-trade of the propagandist which is why it is specifically forbidden in section 1.2 of the code of ethics defined and articulated by the SA Press Council.
Ryland Fisher, a former Cape Times editor writes a weekly column for Weekend Argus and on 28 April it carried an article by him headlined ANC needs to convince voters it deserves another shot.
The article was about the decision by the ANC to appoint former Western Cape Premier, Ebrahim (Brown Bag) Rasool, as the party’s local election coordinator for 2019.
Here’s what Fisher’s article specifically did not mention about Rasool:
- He was recalled by the ANC as Western Cape Premier in 2008 and replaced by Lynne Brown after it was claimed that Rasool and the unspeakable Marius Fransman had attempted to sell the Somerset Hospital site to a Dubai consortium – a claim Rasool and Fransman predictably denied
- After a Cape Argus reporter, Ashley Smith, testified under oath that he had accepted bribes from Rasool and Fransman to plant articles in the newspaper detrimental to Mcebisi Skwatsha and his rival faction and favourable to Rasool – a claim they both denied
- After Benny Gool and Roger Friedman of the Oryx media company testified that Rasool and Fransman had tried to launder money through their company to pay Ashley Smith
- After Rasool in a Cape Argus advertisement had called Coloured people who voted for the Democratic Alliance ‘coconuts’ i.e. brown on the outside but white inside. The headline read: Who are the coconuts? The coconuts are the coloured DA members who still jump to the DP master’s voice!
- After the split between the Skwatsha faction and the Rasool faction led to the resignation from the Western Cape legislature of ANC members Yousuf Gabru and Garth Strachan and the enmity between the two factions became so fractious that Max Ozinsky of the Skwatsha faction openly acknowledged leaking information to the press which was detrimental to the opposing Rasool faction
Zuptoid plunder
One appreciates the strictures which Ryland Fisher experiences but is Ebrahim Rasool the moral figurehead, does he possess the ethical rectitude and the reputation for probity that the ANC needs to persuade Capetonians that it has turned its back on a decade of Zuptoid plunder?
- Capetonians will not have forgotten how more than R2 billion was looted from municipal and provincial coffers between 2003 and 2006 when the ANC was in political control and corruption scandal after corruption scandal dominated the headlines
- They will not have forgotten Tony Ehrenreich’s boast that the ANC would deliberately impoverish white civil servants if the ANC gained control of the province – first they came for the socialists…
- They will not have forgotten the ANC’s complicit silence about Marius Fransman’s overt anti-Semitism – a silence broken only by Ben Turok and Robin Carlisle. They will also have taken note of the latest example of anti-Semitism expressed by the ANC in the provincial legislature
- They will not have forgotten the ANC’s complicit silence when the late Blackman Ngoro, spokesman for and very, very close friend of mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo, claimed that coloured people were innate sots who would die in the gutter unless they adopted black norms and mores. And they will not have forgotten how, when Alan Boesak broke that silence, he was attacked by Mcebisi Skwatsha
- They will not have forgotten how Jimmy Manyi, invoking the Colour Bar Act of the apartheid era, said that coloured people were in oversupply in the Western Cape and, if they wanted to get work, they should move to other provinces – thereby re-kindling memories of the enforced District Six exodus
- Above all, they will not have forgotten how ANC-affiliated trade union Popcru fully supported coloured prison warders being denied promotion on merit – too dark under the National Party, not dark enough under the ANC. They will not have forgotten how, having been abandoned by the African National Congress because they were Afrikaans speaking in the main and not dark enough, that it was Solidarity, financially supported by the FW de Klerk Foundation, who brought them justice and the sort of ethnic equality which they naively thought the Freedom Charter guaranteed them
- They might even have read the e-mailed letter from D Brouwer published in Business Day on 11 June this year which revealed just how cynical the ANC’s approach is to the coloured vote:
His (Yunus Carrim’s) own party also frequently dumps racial minority members from ANC election lists. How does he explain away the culling of coloured ANC councillors in Tshwane?
Let him produce one currently sitting coloured councillor who made it onto the electoral commission-submitted list in 2016 and again after 2017’s list revision.
President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC Gauteng provincial chairman, Paul Mashatile, approved this “ethnic cleansing” both times. Let them produce any racial-minority ANC metro councillor in the national capital. They cannot.
Four million people voted for the DA in the 2014 general election so Yonela Diko’s plagiarised augury of the extinction of the main opposition party is clearly far-fetched.
Uninspiring duo
I would have been more sanguine about the ANC’s chances if its Western Cape team had been led by someone like Trevor Manuel rather than the uninspiring duo of Ebrahim (Brown Envelope) Rasool and Faiez (Snotklap) Jacobs who beats up his own staff.
‘It’s the economy stupid’ was the Clinton administration mantra and all the indications are that Ramaphoria is losing its lustre by the hour as the economy shrinks as unemployment grows and the ANC keeps taking itself to court while complaining about the DA ‘abusing’ the court process for political gain.
How will this play out in Cape Town during next year’s general election?
In 2014 Yunus Kemp, one of three Newspaper House editors to resign within a fortnight recently, wrote a puff piece about Ebrahim Rasool’s return to local politics. Its intention was clear.
‘The former Western Cape premier and current South African ambassador to the US has been on a whistle-stop tour of Cape Town in a bid to convince the middle-class electorate, especially Muslims, to vote for the ANC.’
The ANC clearly sees the Muslim vote in the Western Cape to be of symbolic importance and President Ramaphosa was invited by the Muslim Judicial Society (MJC) for Iftar in Rylands last month.
This was part of a charm offensive by Ramaphosa which saw him, for example, addressing the Afrikaner Bond centenary dinner on June 7, a welcome conciliation move which had echoes of Nelson Mandela visiting Orania to have coffee with Betsy Verwoerd.
The Gatesville Mosque (Ward 46) is an Islamic landmark in Cape Town and, I believe, is a significant indicator of the Muslim vote in the Mother City. So which way will Ward 46 vote next year?
Fikile (Razzmatazz) Mbalula has indicated that the 2019 ANC campaign in the Western Cape will be based on racially-divisive lines saying “Under Premier Comrade Rasool the poor people came first”. This is a sentiment that I am sure Tokyo Sexwale will agree with. But will this resonate in Ward 46 where, according to the 2011 census and under a DA administration…
- 97% of residents had access to water – about 25% higher than the national average
- 93% had access to toilets – about 1.5 times the national rate
- 97% had their refuse removed – about 1.5 times the national rate
In the 2016 municipal election, the DA took 74% of the Ward 46 vote, the ANC 9% and the EFF 2%. Somehow I can’t see the popular and hard-working local DA ward councillor, Mogamat Aslam Cassiem, being deposed in next year’s election.
In a recent Daily Maverick article Ebrahim Rasool came up with this hypocritical gem:
On the right wing of our political spectrum, the DA’s growth has not been organic, but based on the absorption of other parties, often leaving their shells but winning their voters, enticing their politicians, as well as owning a large part of the original sin of South Africa: intolerant racism, colonial dispossession and apartheid’s legacy of institutionalised corruption.
Hello?
Really?
Aside from the irony of the ‘institutionalised corruption’ reference, I was personally present as an SABC reporter at a 2002 media conference when Rasool congratulated Premier Marthinus van Schalkwyk for moving his staff – whose salaries he couldn’t pay because the NNP was bankrupt – onto the payroll of the Cape Provincial Administration as a further burden for the taxpayer. It was clear that a beaming Ebrahim Rasool approved. At the time the ANC had joyously welcomed Kortbroek’s party into its fold where its politicians were immediately at home because of the similarities of their ethos and policies. Now he tries to invoke the apartheid past while former National Party politicians find themselves very much at home in his party.
Land Bank theft
On 3 April, the South African Government News Agency issued a media statement confidently predicting that, on that very day, the chairman of ICASA and a former ANC MP Rubben Mohlaloga would be sentenced for his part in a 2008 scam which saw R6 million snouted from the Land Bank – the latest of many such scams – ask Helena Dolny, she’ll tell you.
Two months later he remains on suspension on full pay and enjoying all perks five and a half years after being arrested. All this while we are earnestly assured that the ‘new’ ANC is serious about countering corruption – but as the prospect of a senior ANC cadre serving jail time becomes ever-more remote.
Every day brings new revelations of ANC-linked corruption, the catastrophic collapse of service delivery and an ominous portent of unsustainable government spending.
What is most telling and most troubling is the failure of the party’s new order to respond to a claim made by Jacob Zuma at his recent court appearance that he was aware of pervasive corruption in the organisation but had not reported this to the police, laid charges or intervened in any way to alter the situation. This contravenes section 34 (1) of the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act which requires ‘any person who holds a position of authority and who knows or ought to reasonably to have suspected that any other person has committed [an act of corruption]’ to report such crimes.
Capetonians must decide whether they wish to maintain that system and that status quo by voting, this time next year, for the party of Ebrahim Rasool and the Daily Maverick’s resident plagiarist, Yonela Diko.
The question they must ask themselves is whether they want the Western Cape municipalities brought into line with the other dysfunctional, insolvent and corruptly-extractive ANC-controlled municipalities in the country with their appalling service delivery records.
- Ed Herbst is a retired veteran journalist who writes in his own capacity.