TOM EATON | Cape Town taxi strike plays both sides against the middle

The ongoing taxi strike in Cape Town is taking a heavy toll on the city’s workers and many of the businesses that employ them. But it has also presented both the DA and the ANC with a gift as they start squaring up ahead of next year’s election.

Critics of the DA, including transport minister Sindisiwe Chikunga, have seized on claims that the city was using its own amended bylaws to impound hundreds of taxies, and not, as the city insists, simply enforcing existing national legislation. Social media is awash with accusations than the city is inconsistent (read unfair and possibly discriminatory) when it comes to issuing permits, and that the current crackdown is racist.

The DA, however, knows that many South African voters are watching the events in Cape Town and finding themselves approving of the city’s hard-line approach against an unregulated and entirely unaccountable industry that is a byword for dangerous, arrogant and aggressive behaviour on public roads, and which has almost certainly had a hand in destroying attempts to create public transport.

It might be unfair to use the taxi industry as a symbol of the decay of South Africa — it is, after all, vastly more efficient than the ANC, and keeps an infinitely higher number of people in touch with employment — but this week, as many current and potential DA voters look at Cape Town, they see not only a DA-run city enforcing the laws the ANC refuses to. They see something bigger: a symbolic stand being taken against a lawless, failing state and the mafias that thrive in the ensuing chaos.

It’s alarming for the ANC, but it’s also political gold, because now, with an election next year, it can subtly push the narrative that the already-different Western Cape wants to distance itself even further from the rest of the country.

For the ANC, however, the strike is an even bigger gift, because it gets to turn both likely outcomes into votes.

For some time, now, the Western Cape has been calling for the devolution of certain powers, specifically around policing and transport. To ANC apparatchiks, drawn to the Soviet model of ultra-centralised power, such calls have clear secessionist echoes.

But so far they’ve been only that: calls. Recent events, however, with confused mutterings about unjust, DA-approved bylaws suddenly exploding into convoys of taxis being dragged off the highways, must have felt like a Rhodesia-style Unilateral Declaration of Independence.

It’s alarming for the ANC, but it’s also political gold, because now, with an election next year, it can subtly push the narrative that the already-different Western Cape wants to distance itself even further from the rest of the country. And who would want to be apart from a non-racist, democratic, ANC-led South Africa, you ask? Easy: anti-democratic racists who want apartness, aka, apartheid.

If the strike ends quickly, with Cape Town offering even minor concessions, the ANC can tell its voters that it has successfully crushed the secessionist tendencies that yearn for Apartheid 2.0, and that it is clearly very much in charge of this country, despite no evidence that it’s actually doing any governance.

If the strike drags on, then it will simply be proof that the forces of counterrevolution and reaction are becoming more emboldened than ever, and that the only thing that can save us is five more years of ANC mismanagement.

The streets of Cape Town are eerily quiet. Supermarket shelves are empty. Businesses are about to start going under. But for our politicians, safe in the hedged bet that is their entire profession, it’s business as usual. And business is booming.