History has taught us the flipside to pre-voting victories of new bridges, roads, clinics, title deed handovers, classrooms and food hamper gift packs to woo the electorate is the polling pestilence of manipulated protests, damaged infrastructure, manufactured personal information leaks and in some instances orchestrated hits.
Political Survivor 2024 is in full force and last week leaders in Joburg and Durban were knee-deep in it.
Johannesburg mayor Kabelo Gwamanda condemned calls by residents for a rates and taxes boycott, saying the calls are a political ploy to undermine an administration amid service delivery problems across the city.
This comes after Johannesburg residents spent days without water due to an outage at Rand Water's Eikenhof pump station after an lighting incident which took out the transformer.
But because the dry taps are a trending national phenomenon — thanks to a trifecta of incompetence, ageing infrastructure and crippling municipal coffers brought on by debt and squandered resources — a gatvol populace stretched to the limit by crime, load-shedding and a suffocating economic climate are not taking water outages lightly, hence threats of a rates boycott.
The talk is the ANC’s rival in the upcoming polls under former president Jacob Zuma is the puppet master responsible for 'sabotage' in the form of dry taps in many suburbs and the piles of rubbish lining the streets.
Gwamanda, however, believes it is a “politically motivated approach to undermine black leadership”, which threatens the financial sustainability of the municipality and thus local government. He proposes — regardless of the service delivery challenges — dialogue and solution-driven engagement.
His counterpart in eThekwini, which is in the throes of a two-week illegal strike by municipal workers over national salary scales, has seen the beleaguered municipality descend into a toxic dump site. Piles of rotting refuse have lined streets from Umhlanga to Umlazi with the threat of disease looming, while eThekwini is already reeling from a surge in pink-eye infections last week.
The city went to court, and while striking workers were slapped with an interdict to desist, the strike intensified, leading to infrastructure damage amid speculation that the union was being manipulated by a political faction bent on seeing the ANC-led municipality fail.
The talk is the ANC’s rival in the upcoming polls under former president Jacob Zuma is the puppet master responsible for “sabotage” in the form of dry taps in many suburbs and the piles of rubbish lining the streets.
Mayor Mxolisi Kaunda has adopted a hardline stance to the strike, saying the city will not tolerate “anarchy” and it was not running a “Banana Republic, nor will we be held to ransom”.
Residents and ratepayers, however, are being held to ransom in the short and long term. The impact of the strike is felt now, and the cost to damaged infrastructure will be felt in the years to come — while parties play political games in the battle for power and ultimately control of the budget.
The threat to social stability shouldn’t be a factor in the run-up to this country’s most crucial democratic test yet. The strategy of using the populace as pawns will have negative implications in years to come and must stop immediately.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.