Polls indicate that South Africa’s former ruling party will be lucky to get 15% in the upcoming April 14 election — down from about 38% in the 1999 election — in its stronghold of the Western Cape. But there was no sign of despondency in its ranks when its leader, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, took to meeting voters on the West Coast on Tuesday.
Van Schalkwyk, who has been premier for two years in a joint African National Congress and New National Party government, swept in with bodyguards and entourage into the steel-making town of Vredenburg — about an hour from Cape Town — to an assembled group of about 100 people in the sports club. The hall was made up mainly of NNP T-shirt-clad coloured people — to whom Van Schalkwyk referred throughout the day as “brown people”.
At each occasion during the day former apartheid-era sports minister Abe “Big Abe” Williams — who resigned as welfare minister in former president Nelson Mandela’s unity Cabinet when he was found to have misused pension funds — said if British Prime Minister Tony Blair could talk to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, then there was no reason why Van Schalkwyk and Mbeki should not work together.
Coloured people could not be left behind and Van Schalkwyk pledged on several occasions — at stops in Pater Noster and St Helena — that the time for NNP supporters to be “at the back of the queue”, whether for housing or welfare, was over. That was why the NNP had to be part of the government, he argued, to ensure that he and his ministers could fight for their supporters’ rights — just as the ANC would fight for the rights of its members.
Nearby the Democratic Alliance recently won a significant majority in a by-election in Malmesbury — with the NNP coming a poor third in a municipal ward where it was once predominant. But Van Schalkwyk dismissed the DA as being of those people who “already have houses and jobs”. NNP people included those who had no houses and were unemployed and they needed to be in the government.
In opposition one could not build a house, or appoint a policeman or woman or build a school. He said never again would the DA “climb on the back” of the NNP into the government as it had done for a short period during the past five years — when the NNP joined the Democratic Party to form the DA, which then controlled the government in the Western Cape.
Van Schalkwyk — to dancing and singing by NNP minstrels at all three locations — did not take questions from the crowds. But at one stop at a fisherman’s cottage on the beach at Pater Noster, an unemployed 21-year-old mother, Nerissa Coraizan, carrying her toddler Amorey, said unemployment was the big issue in the neighbourhood. She was not sure if she would vote for the premier’s party, she said — but indicated that she would definitely not be voting for the ANC.
At another house nearby a domestic worker, Sophie Jansen, said she would be voting for the premier and was pleased he had come to visit her. She had moved to the Western Cape from Calvinia in the Northern Cape to seek work.
Meanwhile, Williams danced and jumped to the sound of the minstrels and pointed out that there was 60% unemployment in the Pater Noster area. Van Schalkwyk noted at the Fish Market — built in the early 1990s for the local community to sell fish — that it had closed down largely because of the quota system imposed by the national government.
He promised to fight for a better system where small fisherman were given rights of access. But he acknowledged this could take a while and told people to find ways of gaining access to increased tourism. He expected tourism numbers to the Western Cape to triple in the next few years from the million or so visitors last year.
Meanwhile there was much DA-bashing. Van Schalkwyk said there were some leaders who seemed to change their minds at a drop of a hat. Now DA leader Tony Leon was suggesting that his party could work with the ANC and NNP in the government — although he had vowed never to do so before.
He said his children could recognise when someone was so wrong that they were “like a chameleon in a Smartie box”, he said to much laughter from the assembled crowd at Vredenburg — most of them bussed in by the party. — I-Net Bridge
Special Report: Elections 2004