Will ANC walk if booted out?

If the ANC is finally shown the door by the electorate, will it exit voluntarily? The indications are not promising.

African history is not on the side of the optimists, needless to say. Nor is the South African experience.

When Cape Town and the Western Cape fell to the opposition, in 2006 and 2009, the ANC tried a variety of underhand stratagems to regain power, but these were relatively mild and amateurish.

At that stage, the ANC was riding high in confidence. It had in 2004 won a fraction under 70% of the national vote. In the 2009 general election, it was still a handy 66%. In contrast, in 2019 it got 58% and in the local elections last year that was down to 46%.

That’s desperately worrying for thousands of ANC apparatchiks – not only councillors, but unqualified cadres deployed to often ridiculously well-paid jobs – in municipalities countrywide.

In the badlands of KwaZulu-Natal, there’s a case study unfolding on how the ANC responds to the loss of power. It also provides a potential playbook on how other municipalities could address the crippling problem of nonpayment for power and other services.

The uMngeni municipality, centred on the Midlands town of Howick, has national strategic importance, straddling as it does the N3 highway between Durban port and Gauteng’s economic powerhouse. It also has a psychological significance for the ANC, being the ruling party’s first loss of control of a KZN municipality to the Democratic Alliance (DA).

ANC skulduggery was initially petty and doomed to failure, with attempts to prevent the inauguration of a DA-led council. Now the sabotage has become more overt and violent.

This week, a couple of trucks were set alight, roads barricaded and motorists stoned as a small group of Mphophomeni township residents took to the streets of Howick with the encouragement and support of ANC councillors.

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The ostensible cause for the outburst was the municipality’s refusal to replace an electrical transformer, affecting the supply to about 150 Mphophomeni households, which had burnt out because of the overload caused by illegal connections.

It said that before spending R150 000 on a transformer that would inevitably suffer the same fate as its predecessor, inspectors first would conduct an electrical meter audit in the area. ANC structures seized the opportunity for some populist havoc. A group of around 20 to 30 protesters was mobilised – ferried to and fro by ANC councillors who also provided takeaway meals – to unleash intimidatory mayhem.

For once, though, those in authority did not instantaneously fold. Mayor Chris Pappas called for the intervention of the Public Order Policing (POP) unit to assist the town’s traffic cops and private security guards.

When they initially failed to act, he released a statement saying that the municipality would, if necessary, seek a court order: “POP cannot sit idly by and watch the destruction of property and the threats to life,” he wrote.

Unlike other violent incidents, which have no repercussions for the instigators and protagonists, criminal charges are being laid by the municipality. For now, the illegal protest is over. Pappas has no illusions that this is the end of the matter. “They will come again, smarter and better organised. We, too, will have to up our game.”

The events in uMngeni show the double bind that the ANC is in. It created the nonpayment monster when in the late 1990s it discouraged the prosecution of defaulters on rates and services charges. The upshot has been a calamitous collapse in municipal infrastructure.