Chris Pappas’ book on uMngeni Municipality a recipe for saving South Africa?

uMngeni mayor Chris Pappas believes that South Africa is not beyond repair. It is broken, it can be fixed. But it’s going to take a lot of sweat.

A book Pappas co-authored with his deputy Sandile Mnikathi is a small-town roadmap about getting their hands dirty to save their municipality. Saving South Africa – Lessons from the uMngeni Municipality, is a message of hope to the rest of the country. It may a be stuff up of note, but it can be turned around.

The pair’s political rise to mayor of the uMngeni Municipality in KwaZulu-Natal Midlands was the DA’s only win in the province in the 2021 municipal elections. According to Pappas, they inherited a shattered town, inefficient with an exhausted bank account and many pairs of long fingers along the way.

“We wanted to tell the story of our administration’s experiences, the challenges we faced, and our successes,” Pappas said.

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He emphasised that the narrative was designed to provide a practical blueprint for other municipalities experiencing similar governance issues. But it was not all sunshine and roses.

Mission possible at uMngeni Municipality

The Citizen previously spent a day with Pappas and Mnikathi at work. It is a relentless road trip between outlying villages, with the Midlands town of Howick slap-bang in the centre. Two years ago, Pappas had big plans, and he has rolled them all out. The city is clean, services are being delivered and the administration started clawing back and weeding out corruption.

“When we took office, the difficulties were apparent from the start. It was about navigating a system entrenched in dysfunctionality,” Pappas said. This initial situation set the stage for their mission possible.

“There were quite hairy situations involving armed individuals entering our offices (about tenders) and financial leakages that needed plugging,” he said. “It was challenges that we faced daily, and we had to confront them head-on instead of being intimidated,” he added.

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Throughout the book, Pappas and Mnikathi discuss the broader implications of their work in uMngeni. “This isn’t just about the large-scale political scandals often reported in the media; it’s about rooting out corruption at the municipal level, which can be just as pervasive and destructive as on a provincial or national level,” said the mayor.

“One of our primary approaches was to understand and then dismantle the existing bureaucratic barriers systematically. It is about understanding the system to reform it effectively,” he explained. It was a progressive and methodical approach to governance reform that is also central theme in the book, it suggests a pragmatic and practical approach to political leadership.

Pappas said that the book was not intended to be, like many other local politically based books, a treatise of complaint. “Things are bad, they are broken. It is everywhere. It is what we discovered as we peeled away the layers of malfeasance and mismanagement in the municipality. But it is also a book that shares the hope we had to succeed in the beginning, and the even greater hope we have now after seeing that it is possible to fix something that’s really broken, badly,” he said.

Pappas says many places in SA beyond saving

Saving South Africa was written in parallel, and shares several themes, to Pappas’ thesis for his master’s degree in town planning.

“Many places in South Africa are beyond saving in their current form and require restarting from scratch. However, there are equally as many places that can still be saved with enough willpower and the right political leaders,” he added.

Pappas is also the DA’s premier candidate for this year’s national poll. It is the province to watch and a potential flint for national unrest.

“Campaigning in KZN is intense and fraught with danger, but it’s also incredibly rewarding,” he said, noting a recent incident where police had to intervene, human barricade the stage where he was debating and then ushering Pappas’ delegation to safety through a side entrance because of intelligence that indicated a possible attempt on this life.

“It’s scary, but exciting at the same time,” he said. “But the mission will continue.”

He said that it is the reality of politics in South Africa, of politics in KZN. But to effect change, he said, you cannot shy away from anything, because if we are going to save our country, we must confront the challenges head-on.

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