A seasoned politician remarked this week that “there is no message like the one delivered by the electorate”. For some of the thousands of candidates who contested last week’s local government polls in the Durban Metro, that message must be a bitter pill to swallow.
Poor Kathuravaloo Vallaraman, who contested the sparsely-populated Hawaan Nature Reserve outside Tongaat on an Inkatha Freedom Party ticket. She must have voted for herself, but nobody else did, making her the most spectacular loser of the race. Of course her African National Congress opponent scored only 32 votes.
Independent candidate Pellie Msweli’s family probably cast the four votes she received in the nearby Amanzinyama ward where 191 people voted. Dumisane Mkhize of the Independents for Council grouping must have a bigger family. He won six of the 1 845 votes in his Isipingo ward.
Elizabeth Chetty just scraped into double digit figures, winning 11 out of 3 818 votes cast in the Westcliffe ward of Chatsworth she contested.
While the dismal failure of these political newcomers may spell the end of their political careers, some high-profile politicians did not fare much better. Alleged British neo-Nazi Brendan Willmer’s political brainchild, the Urban Ratepayer’s Foundation, won three seats in Drummond, Sterkspruit and Botha’s Hill on the Western periphery of Durban, but Willmer himself failed to win a seat, gaining only 576 out of 5 107 votes cast in his Umbilo ward.
IFP transitional mayors Joyce Abrahams, Jerome Mshengu and Sipho Mlaba all lost their ward seats, as did IFP election campaign manager Anthony Grinker. Grinker’s central Durban seat went to Democratic Party candidate Sue Burrows.
Voters must have been more impressed by the National Party’s “Hang the killers” posters than by the IFP’s law and order stance. Strong-arm candidate Norman Reeves, owner of Combat Force Security, failed to win either of the two seats in his South Beach ward. The seats went to the NP and DP.
The movers and shakers behind the “Victory” party must be choking on the irony of it all: The party failed to secure a single seat.
The party with the most wounds to lick must be the Pan Africanist Congress. The party saw its 1994 provincial showing of 0,7% drop to an abysmal 0,1%. It failed to win a single seat anywhere and for a party whose principles are based on the advancement of the rural poor, its failure to secure a single rural vote must send it the clearest message of the election.