JEREMY LOVELL and OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Friday
THE South African government has defused a dispute with tribal leaders that threatened to derail next month’s local elections – but now faces a new court challenge to postpone the poll from the Afrikaner enclave of Orania, which stands to lose its autonomy.
Orania, in the Northern Cape, is to serve court papers on 48 respondents, including President Thabo Mbeki, in a bid to delay the election. The town, home to about 650 whites, became a private settlement of right-wing Afrikaners in 1991 and elected its own municipal council in 1995.
This would fall away after the December 5 elections when Orania is supposed to start sharing a municipality that includes two neighbouring towns, Hopetown and Strydenburg.
The Freedom Front’s Corne Mulder said Orania could not allow the elections to pass and erode self-determination in the enclave, as that would lift all pressure on Mbeki to flesh out the Afrikaner’s ethnic rights.
”We are not going to fall for their line of ‘Just vote in the election and we will deal with it afterwards’,” he said. ”The African National Congress has a way of postponing things in the hope that they go away.”
Orania claims its right to self-determination is enshrined in the constitution. Its case is due to be heard by the Kimberley High Court on November 27.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s 800 traditional leaders, who hold sweeping powers over millions of people, have been allowed – at least for now – to retain most of their local powers after threatening to boycott the elections.
The local government municipal structures second amendment bill passed to end the dispute allows the chieftains to maintain control of communal lands, which they would have been forced to cede to elected representatives after the vote.
It also – albeit vaguely – commits the newly-elected municipal councils and the traditional leaders to work together for the local good.
Under previous versions of the amendment bill traditional leaders would have been limited to ceremonial functions, including organising ceremonies and the collection of firewood. The chiefs dismissed those versions as insulting.
Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi stressed that the new bill was an interim measure until government policy on the role of traditional leaders was finalised, with a White Paper due by March 2001. – Reuters/AFP