The Shangaan community in the Northern Province fears it will be sidelined in the municipality shake-up Evidence wa ka Ngobeni
For the past two years Mzamani Mathebula has been queuing at Nandoni dam, an incomplete water reservoir project in the Northern Province, in search of employment.
Mathebula, who has been unemployed for the past seven years, says he is unable to get a job at the dam for one simple reason he is a Shangaan. His plight is shared across the Shangaan community in the Malamulele area, 200km from Pietersburg.
On the other side of the Livumbu river from Malamulele is Thohoyandou, a Venda-dominated town, which the Shangaan community fears will take them over after the December 5 elections.
Malamulele residents say that only Vendas from the Thohoyandou villages of Nandoni and Dovheni are hired at the dam.
The Shangaan community says this exemplifies why they oppose the decision by the Demarcation Board to merge Malamulele with Thohoyandou as part of the nationwide shake- up of local government.
The Malamulele Border Committee, which has been appointed by the community to oppose the merger, believes the new municipality will be dominated by Vendas and will ignore the other, impoverished side of the Livumbu river.
Before 1994 Malamulele and Thohoyandou fell under the former homelands of Gazankulu and Venda respectively. After South Africa’s first democratic elections both areas received transitional local council status.
According to Nandoni dam engineer Neels Du Buisson, the decision to give preference to Vendas seeking jobs was based on a labour policy drawn up by the project’s steering committee. He says that Vendas have benefited from the project by default not because of discrimination.
“We have an employment policy which we work with. According to the policy people who must be employed here must be those that are directly and physically affected by the project.”
Du Buisson says he was advised by the project’s labour desk to give first preference to those living in the villages near the dam. However, the fact that the Shangaan-dominated village of Makuleke is only 1km away from the dam fuels accusations that Shangaan villages are being sidelined.
One of the most prominent traditional leaders in the Malamulele area, King Shilungwa Mhinga, who insists Shangaans are being sidelined by Vendas, says his people are loyal to the African National Congress but “are getting a raw deal”.
He says the ANC recorded the highest percentage of votes more than 90% at the local government level in Malamulele in the 1995 municipal elections but failed to thank Malamulele people.
Instead, Mhinga says, ANC president Thabo Mbeki went to address people in Thohoyandou. Mhinga, who believes that Thohoyandou is being developed at the expense of Malamulele, says that his people have approached the Human Rights Commission to investigate tribalism and nepotism allegedly committed by Thohoyandou’s administration.
“If you look at all government departments, all senior managers are Vendas and Thohoyandou is being developed while in our area nothing is being developed,” he says.
Malamulele Border Committee secretary Dr Wisani Nkuna confirms that concerns were raised about the employment policy at the Nandoni dam but is unwilling to broach the matter.
Nkuna is nevertheless happy to discuss Malamulele’s wider concerns. He says the town will not be “adequately” represented in the new municipal structure.
Nkuna claims that 31 out of the 36 members of the new municipal council will come from Thohoyandou and are likely to represent the interest of that area.
The people of Malamulele are not convinced by the ANC’s assurance that council members would represent the interests of both areas.
Nkuna says the committee is raising money to fight the merger in court. Communities are contributing between R10 and R20 a house to fund the court action. Lawyers representing the Malamulele community said they are considering lodging the case in the high court this week.
About 70 000 people in the Malamulele area have registered to vote, but traditional leaders in the area have called for the postponement of the elections until their grievances are addressed.
The chiefs claim that their people were not adequately consulted by the Demarcation Board.
They have expressed outrage at the decision by the board to give municipal status to areas far smaller than Malamulele. They say areas like Mutale/Musisi have been given municipality status although it did not have government infrastructure to serve its 20 000 population.
At present the tiny town in Malamulele, which has a population of more than 280 000, hosts eight government departments including health, welfare, safety and security and public works. Nkuna says that in the new structure the government departments in Malamulele will serve as satellite offices only.
Malamulele residents have said that they want their area to have its own municipality or, as a second choice, be merged with Giyani, the former capital of the Gazankulu.
“If the chiefs say we must not vote we won’t. The same applies to the merger; whatever they say, we have to go with it. But if they agree to the merger of Malamulele and Thohoyandou, we will go with it with great pain,” says resident Jonas Mashawu.
The chiefs say the merger is a throwback to the apartheid era when Vendas and Shangaans lived together in Thohoyandou under the Vembe Administration at Sibasa.
Under the Group Areas Act Shangaan-owned houses in Thohoyandou were razed by the police and residents were herded at gunpoint on to open trucks, leaving behind their livestock, and transported to their “new home”, which they named Malamulele.
The name Malamulele, says Nkuna, “came as a celebration of being freed from the bondage of the administration at Sibasa”.
Unemployment in the nearby villages forces people like Mthavini Chauke to walk more than 40km every day in search of piece-jobs. She says: “How can they expect our people to go back to Venda while we fought with these people for a long time? Vendas must stay in Venda and we must stay here on our own as well. There is no problem with that.”
In Thohoyandou, however, a majority of people welcome the merger. Resident Ngwendzeni Mamatho says he hopes it will end the “hatred” which some Vendas and Shangaans had developed over the years. “I think we should look at this as a new era and instil a sense of love in our children, because to me this merger is not a problem,” says Mamatho.
In Malamulele many residents said they were not surprised Thohoyandou people welcomed the merger, claiming that Venda stood to benefit.
“They [Vendas] are now saying that ‘Dzebe lo vuyela mufhinini [The hoe has been brought together with the handle].’ The hoe in this case is our people [Shangaans] and they [Vendas] are the handle or the lever if you like. This means that because we used to stay with them and left they are now saying that we have returned. You see that’s the problem and we cannot allow that,” says Roy Mabasa, a Malamulele resident.
OT Malingi, deputy mayor for Thohoyandou, says his people are struggling to unite Thohoyandou and Malamulele and would not rest until that is achieved.
Malingi says the current border crisis and the Nandoni dam project accusations were a result of apartheid’s legacy of separate development. Malingi confirmed that more than 80% of the workers at Nandoni dam were Vendas, but said this was not the result of discrimination against Shangaans.
“They [Shangaans] have to understand that there are people who have been affected and some who will be moved from their homes because of the project,” Malingi says, adding that Shangaans also have their own water project that employs only Shangaans.
“Now what we must be looking at is to work together and forget this whole apartheid legacy of separate development. We are one free and democratic country after all,” he says.