Sechaba ka’Nkosi A group of former Afri- can National Congress-linked self-defence unit members and residents displaced by political violence in Thokoza on the East Rand in the early 1990s have formed a civic movement to oppose the ANC in the forthcoming local government elections. The new party, the Displacees Ratepayers’ Association (DRA), was formed two weeks ago and registered officially this week with the Independent Electoral Commission. It has already put forward five candidates to contest all the wards in an attempt to wrest power from the ruling party in the December 5 local government elections. At a mass meeting in a school hall on Wednesday, the party leaders explained their next objective after registration in typical rhetoric: to rid Thokoza of corrupt ANC councillors who have forgotten about the masses who put them there in the first place.
“From today onwards you are liberated from electricity switch-offs and water cuts,” said DRA chair Sam Theron, to loud applause. “We have the power to make noise about how we should be governed and not how people think we want to be governed.” Another round of applause. About 300 members gathered at the local Maphanzela Primary School, mostly women and pensioners and a sprinkling of youth activists. The DRA puts its membership figures at around 3 000. It is not your ordinary political party. Its meetings are conducted in Zulu and instead of toyi-toying, only religious hymns are sung. Perhaps the closest they come to politics is through shouts of “Amandla!” during the meeting, “Down with the councillors!” and “All power to the people!” One of the main objectives of the party is to bring people from different political persuasions together on civic matters. The leaders claim to have attracted mainly people who were forced to flee their homes at the height of the political violence between the ANC-supporting township residents and the Inkatha Freedom Party hostel dwellers. There is no intention to develop the DRA into a fully-fledged political party to contest provincial and national elections. What binds the members together is a shared disgruntlement with civic matters – mainly with the ANC-led Greater Alberton City Council. Immediate problems such as water and electri-city cuts are some of the reasons why they feel alienated by the council.
The party’s power base lies in Phenduka section, one of the areas hardest hit by the violence and where the Thokoza Phenduka Displacees Committee, the DRA’s predecessor, was launched after the 1994 general election.
Phenduka section – which lies opposite the notorious Khumalo Street that separates township houses from the hostels – was a ghost village for a few weeks in the early 1990s, until hostel dwellers crossed the road and moved into the abandoned houses. The original resi-dents started trickling back in 1997, reclaiming their homes. Today Phenduka is abuzz with activity. “The DRA is apolitical,” general secretary Teboho Ncheke told the crowd at the rally. “We are a product of a certain period of time that had to fight against the [Inkatha Freedom Party] only to realise that peace was the strongest weapon we had. Now one of our main objectives is to bring permanent peace to Thokoza.” Peace is one of the areas the DRA can rightfully claim to have contributed to. Last year the party played an important role in spearheading the erection of a monument for nearly 1 000 residents killed during the violence. In conjunction with other parties in the township, the DRA – through its forerunner, the displacees committee – orchestra-ted a high-profile rally, addressed by the ANC president Thabo Mbeki and his IFP counterpart, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to launch the monument.
The ANC leaders in Thokoza claim the DRA is a product of their party’s failure to deal with it through local structures. Instead, they claim the ANC’s provincial and national structures bypassed local branches, preferring to deal with the displacees directly – in the process undermining grassroots activists and the council and giving unnecessary publicity to the DRA leaders.
Says one: “We never saw a reason for the displacees committee because most of the people had returned to their homes and there was peace in Thokoza. By sharing platforms with them, ANC leaders gave them tacit approval to exist, even though we told them that these people had always been opposed to progressive structures in the area.” Ncheke is himself a former secretary of the ANC Youth League in Thokoza and a self- confessed self- defence unit commander. Of the DRA leaders, he is the most articulate and the most disgruntled with the ANC. One of the problems he identifies is a lack of development for the displacees and the contempt with which the council treats them. Among allegations levelled against the council is misappropriation of the Presidential Kathorus Project – a programme founded by former president Nelson Mandela in 1994 to fund rebuilding and development projects in Katlehong, Thokoza and Vosloorus after the violence. Residents at the meeting said some of the houses had not been properly reconstructed. Some claimed their roofs had been blown off during last week’s heavy rains. When they approached the council, it refused to help and instead allegedly tried to force DRA members to pay for electricity and water debts accumulated by the hostel dwellers who had occupied their houses illegally for several years. They claim that even though an agreement was reached with the council to scrap the arrears nothing has been done as yet. “We have a responsibility to get them [councillors] off the gravy train,” says John Khumalo, a former ANC elder who is now the DRA’s preferred candidate for the mayoral position. “They were given enough time to keep in touch with the mood of the people who elected them and deliver on the basis of the mandate they got, but they failed. It’s time we move on.”