posters
Paul Kirk
During the June election Amichand Rajbansi’s Minority Front unleashed a secret weapon on Durban: a king-size poster. Now Rajbansi has to pay the price.
Durban has strict by-laws relating to the placement of election posters. No posters can be placed on traffic signs, no more than one poster can be erected on a light post and they cannot be placed on freeways or bridges. If they are, the council removes them and charges the party for doing so.
The Minority Front’s June posters were twice the size of those of the opposition parties. They sported a full-length portrait of Rajbansi with the words “All The Way”.
The posters were pasted all over Durban – including places that raised the ire of the council. A contractor was hired to remove them and the Minority Front received a bill for R131 000. Five months later the bill has still not been paid.
Asked when he would pay the debt, Rajbansi was adamant the council had done him wrong. “Indians by nature do things with great fanfare. Of course an election is no different. We were not going to have piddly little posters like the other parties. Had the council simply told us what we had done wrong we would have corrected the problem ourselves. Instead we simply got this massive bill sent to us,” he said.
According to Rajbansi, the councillors are not the only ones out to get him. The veteran politician recently claimed that his political opponents used witchcraft to haunt his home and drive a rift between himself and his wife, who recently left him and joined the Inkatha Freedom Party.
Rajbansi claims evil spirits and demons have been tormenting him for more than 20 years, but that, like with the enormous poster bill that has come to haunt him, he has taken the witchcraft in his stride. “Cowboys do not cry. My record speaks for itself, I am a strong person who has never been afraid to fight for the small guy. I can also fight for myself. This poster thing is an attempt to blacken my name,” he maintains.
“I have a real problem with the council. They hire a private contractor to remove the posters and pay them for every poster that is removed. The result is that the contractors removed many posters when there was no need for them to.
“I will attend to this debt. I am a person of high standing in the community and a gentleman who does not have bad debts. However, I first want to have words with the council. I feel we were unfairly treated.
“The council have not been returning my phone calls either. This whole issue came up because the Democratic Party – a party of whiners – have been shooting their mouths off to the media and in council. They owe a lot of money too, so how can they complain about me?”
Rajbansi says that by raising the issue of poster debt, the DP is trying to throw a banana skin under his feet, and it missed. Instead, the DP will be the one that treads on it and slips.
A council representative says the DP was billed R8 000 for placing posters in the wrong places and that the debt was paid within a month of the bill being sent. Rajbansi’s debt is not open to negotiation. “He pays or we go to court. It is that simple,” the representative says.