New Tshwane mayor Nasiphi Moya has promised stability, and if Herman Mashaba keeps flip-flopping as hard as he has been, we may well see weeks or even months of stability in the metro before she’s yanked out of office by the ANC or EFF.
To her credit, Moya has positioned herself as someone who is very concerned about the growing inequality in the metro, which I assume means that she will become more and more concerned as inequality continues to grow.
She is also frustrated by the political squabbles that have bedevilled Tshwane, and in a recent interview with TimesLIVE, quoted the African proverb that claims ‘when elephants fight, it is the grass the suffers’.
Now, it goes without saying that one should have an automatic and stringent distrust of any politician who uses that proverb, implying, as it does, that politicians are enormous, strong, intelligent beings while the public is there to be walked on or eaten.
She is saying the right words, but more than anyone she will know just how hollow some of them are. Not because she’s lying — on the contrary, she seems to be a fairly straight arrow — but because of whom she is serving.
It also doesn’t work in this context of Moya’s election: given that ActionSA won less than 4% of the vote in the metro on May 29, there’s an argument to be made that the grass has become the mayor of Tshwane.
In this case, however, I think we can forgive her, mostly because her hand was forced.
In September, when Dada Morero became Johannesburg’s umpteenth mayor, he famously told the public not to expect any progress during his term. He took some flak at the time, but the fact remains that he stands a very good chance of becoming the first ANC politicians to have achieved all his publicly stated goals, namely, nothing.
This, of course, created a problem for ActionSA, which has branded itself as being in total opposition to the ANC, which it considers a criminal cabal, except for when it doesn’t, like when it might get a mayoral chain in Tshwane.
The point, though, is that if ANC mayors are going around being dismally honest, you can’t blame the competition for having to pick a strategy at the other end of the scale, that is, the earnest, progressive, promise-laden rhetoric we’ve heard so many times before.
Jokes aside, though, I don’t envy Moya. She is saying the right words, but more than anyone she will know just how hollow some of them are. Not because she’s lying — on the contrary, she seems to be a fairly straight arrow — but because of whom she is serving.
Of course she’ll insist that she is serving the people of Tshwane, and in some ways she will be. But ultimately she is serving the interests of the new coalition, and in local politics, the primary interest of coalitions is always very clear: their own preservation.
Still, let’s wish her luck. She’s going to need plenty.
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