Barry Streek
Judgement day for the Democratic Alliance is approaching as tensions within the party largely between former New National Party and the Democratic Party members reach boiling point.
Next week advocate Willem Heath will release his report into “streetgate”, the saga surrounding fraudulent votes collected in support of Cape Town mayor Peter Marais’s bid to change the names of two streets.
The saga over the street names has exposed the fault lines in the DA, which recently turned one year old. On one side is the DP, which makes much of its commitment to transparency and clean governance. On the other is the NNP, exposed in the saga for less-principled habits reminiscent of the tactics employed by the former National Party.
While the street-naming is self-evidently a trivial matter, the project itself and the subsequent scandal have repeatedly exposed the differences between the NNP and the DP.
Marais represents much that is anathema to the DP. He is prone to scandal, and happy to play the race card.
Heath is expected to come down heavily on individual officials involved in the vote-rigging saga, but may not have enough to tie Marais directly to the actual fraud. Whether Marais can be cleared of maladministration, however, is a different question. Marais has, for example, been shown to have made misleading statements about what he calls the “public participation process”.
While the DA needs to live up to its commitment to transparent government, Marais is portrayed as one of the NNP’s most important drawcards. A botched attack could backfire and exacerbate already fraught relations between the NNP and the DP.
The DP is divided into two groups on Marais one is that he is a political problem, and that whether or not he is tied down by the Heath inquiry he should, willy-nilly, be dispensed with. The second camp is concerned about whether Marais can be eased out without causing other “Nats” to rally around him or even embark on some form of court action.
Heath’s report will first go to a three-man DA committee and then on to the party’s national management committee, chaired by the DP’s James Selfe. The management committee has 10 DP and seven NP members, with a further one from the Federal Alliance.
Tom Lodge, a political science professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, said this week: “I am sure they are all hoping even Tony Leon is hoping for an escape clause so they don’t have to get rid of Marais.”
Lodge said the removal of Marais could lead to a breakdown between the DP and NNP. “In that case, the NNP might want to gang up with [African National Congress] to run the city council, even if there has to be a series of by-elections.”
He added: “To the extent that the DA and Leon want to be in a morally self-righteous position, they will be able to do so less easily from now on.”
Heath’s report will cap two months of tumult in the DA’s Cape operation after the Mail & Guardian first broke the story of the fraudulent votes in June. The DA only snapped into action and called in Heath after a Cape Town council legal adviser, Victoria Johnson, composed a detailed affidavit about the voting process.
One of Leon’s vulnerabilities is that he published the affidavit without Johnson’s permission. The Institute for Democracy in South Africa’s Richard Calland said he was interested to see how Heath deals with the “whistleblower” aspect namely Leon releasing a confidential report to the media. He added: “This is a major test for the DA and the Heath report will have a wider political significance.”
Johnson’s damning affidavit survived the Heath inquiry unscathed. The officials implicated did not seriously dispute her factual account. They instead sought to suggest that she had misinterpreted various events, claiming that the fraudulent petitions and form letters were effectively a coincidence and not part of a deliberate attempt to rig public support for the street-renaming plan.
One of the affidavits presented to the Heath commission, which has not previously been reported, shows how an NNP organiser was ordered by provincial Premier Gerald Morkel to stop gathering support for the move. Morkel said he did not want the public debate over the street renaming to be conducted along party political lines. The affidavit is likely to weaken Marais’s case.
Additional reporting by Mungo Soggot