TOM EATON | Voters’ repeated endorsement of Makana’s gutting doesn’t go unnoticed

It is vital that parliamentary oversight committees keep asking tough questions of the semi-sentient bags of stale porridge that often masquerade as public servants in this country. But this week’s hearings about the collapse of Makana in the Eastern Cape needed to go a little deeper.

On Wednesday, MPs demanded to know how it was that the porridge sacks currently destroying the city formerly known as Grahamstown, and then known as Makhanda, and now known as somewhere to avoid at all costs, were still being paid a salary.

I understand the point of the question, but with all due respect to the honourable members, their implication that the implosion of Makana and of Makhanda is entirely due to a handful of wretched public servants is somewhat simplistic and kicks a far bigger can down the rutted, crumbling, potholed road.

If you Google ‘Makana’, you find a timeline in which relentless decay and the ANC are inseparable.

In 2013, for example, Grocott’s Mail, the local university newspaper, reported that the ANC-run municipality was paying millions of rands to ‘ghost employees’ for services that didn’t exist.

In 2014, the Daily Dispatch revealed that “senior ANC leaders, councillors and officials with links to an ANC mayor” had been named in a “damning forensic report on the chaotic state of Makana municipality”.

If you Google ‘Makana’, you find a timeline in which relentless decay and the ANC are inseparable.

In 2016, the Daily Dispatch told us the whole of Makhanda was without water one day before the National Arts Festival was about to start, the result of power outages and pumps neglected by the ANC-run council.

Of course, three news report spread over four years barely scratch the surface of the grinding failure, corruption and contempt inflicted on the region by the ANC.

And yet one month later, in the 2016 local government elections, voters in Makana gave the ANC 17 out of 27 municipal seats, a glowing endorsement by any measure and official permission to the ANC to keep doing exactly what it had been doing for past many, disastrous years.

Naturally the ANC obliged, and the implosion gathered pace, as did the news reports.

In a 2019 piece about Makhanda, the Financial Mail reported that “what should be a thriving centre in the Eastern Cape is a fast-collapsing mess, with businesses struggling, sewage overflowing, water shortages, electricity problems and tangled finances”.

A year later, the Makhanda high court ordered the municipality to be dissolved. But some things are harder to make disappear, and, in April of 2021, GroundUp reported “overflowing sewage and no refuse collection in Makhanda”.

In July that year GroundUp took a break from the collapse of the town’s water supply to report that the Makana municipality was “dodging responsibility for abandoned houses” that “attract crime”.

Luckily, though, there was another local government election in just a few months, when residents could finally eject the ANC wrecking crew and hire public servants who knew what public service was.

And so it was that on November 1 2021, the people of Makana came together at the polls and ― oh, wait, no, sorry: they re-elected the ANC with 52%, handing it 14 out of 27 seats and giving it another formal confirmation that they approved of how it was letting the whole place rot.

Since then, some things have changed. Makana is now officially ranked in the bottom 2% of South African municipalities. Photographs by GroundUp show that the road around the town’s main traffic circle is now so wrecked that motorists have to drive on the pavement. The 2025 National Arts Festival is a shadow of its former self and is in real danger of winding down as a going concern.

Some things, however, haven’t changed at all: in last year’s general election, voters registered in the Makana municipality ― a place being thoroughly trashed by the ANC ― once again gave the ANC 52% of the vote.

Which brings us back to this week’s parliamentary grilling.

It goes without saying that something huge and fundamental needs to change in Makana. Corruption and dysfunction must be replaced by transparency and competence.

But I can’t help feeling that we’re only tugging on one strand in a Gordian knot by hauling in the sacks of porridge and wagging fingers at them when it is the voters who keep re-hiring them.

Could the civil servants of Makana do better? Perhaps. Could shower mould do better? Almost certainly.

But until voters understand that elections are a way to hire engineers and accountants and electricians, rather than being some kind of knackered political beauty pageant, it seems likely that they’ll continue to hurt themselves by picking the devil they know rather than the bureaucrats they don’t.