The Democratic Alliance claims it has been ruling the roost in Midvaal, a rural municipality 60km outside Johannesburg, for the past 11 years because of exemplary service delivery.
Midvaal is the smaller, maybe duller jewel in the DA’s governance crown after Cape Town. When the party campaigns outside the Western Cape and the “just look at Cape Town” argument starts to wear thin, DA leaders can whip out Midvaal from their back pockets.
The municipality’s main town is Meyerton, only slightly bigger than a one-horse town, while surrounding gehuggies (villages) such as Henley-on-Klip and Walkerville make up the smallest and probably most rural municipality in Gauteng.
A drive to Midvaal feels longer than it is. The roads are lined with endless farmland that produces maize and dairy for most of the province, earning Midvaal the title of the breadbasket of Gauteng.
The wide double-lane streets in Meyerton bear testimony to Midvaal mayor Timothy Nast’s dubbing of the town as a “voortrekkerdorpie turned industrial”. A bust of apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd is tucked away in a corner behind the municipal offices — Nast explains that removing it would cause a public outcry. And later it becomes clear it is this careful balancing of interests in Midvaal that keeps the DA in power.
The DA slogan “We deliver for all” is not empty rhetoric here. Delivery happens to everyone in the same manner. Grass gets cut, rubbish is removed and the only difference in the libraries is that some carry copies of the Daily Sun, others Beeld.
From other towns
At the clinic opposite the mayoral office, 58-year-old Felicia Tole is waiting for the dentist. “I ran away from my home town, Vereeniging, to come here for my teeth,” she confides in the waiting room.
A nurse explains why there are so many patients straight after the Easter weekend. “They all want sick notes and take more days off,” she says, laughing. She is on her way to another clinic in the area.
The municipality received unqualified audits for eight years running and it is clear no luxuries are allowed. The mayor’s five-year-old, midnight-blue Jaguar has had a cracked windscreen on the passenger side for the past year.
“It still works, the person driving can still see through it,” Nast insists, and his impeccably dressed driver, Peter Makitla, enthusiastically agrees. But not all this translates into votes. Bongani Baloyi, the DA campaigner in the local township Sicelo Shiceka, is confused by the results of the 2009 provincial and national elections. “We had at least 150 DA members in the area. But we got only 30 votes. We don’t know what happened,” he says.
Nast may have the answer. He breaks down the DA’s support in the region and that provides the clue to what keeps the DA in power — the stayaway vote. “In Midvaal there are 64% black and 31% white voters. We have 8% of the support in black communities. So it is the white voters that come out to vote,” he says.
“The DA here can bring out the white voters to vote. In local government elections, more than in national or provincial elections, white voters think their party can win, so they come out in numbers.”
To win Midvaal will probably take more effort than ever before. The ANC has wheeled out its big guns, including Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, to remind black voters where their loyalty is supposed to lie.
The DA will continue its campaign strategy called “blue waves”. This entails DA supporters, kitted out with blue T-shirts, flags and banners, walking through township streets. In the suburbs “people don’t want to talk about politics on the weekends”, says Nast — so posters of councillors have to do the trick there. But it is clear the DA will need much more than a squeaky-clean service delivery record to get votes in Sicelo Shiceka.