In what is seen as a test case to break the racial mould of South African politics, the Democratic Alliance is putting up a black candidate in a safe municipal seat in the previously arch-conservative Gauteng town of Vanderbijlpark.
The by-election in Vanderbijlpark, once the domain of the Conservative Party of the late Andries Treurnicht, will take place next Wednesday — in a ward won by the DA in the December 2000 general municipal poll with 92% of the vote.
Then the party’s choice was pitted against a white Afrikaner candidate from the Freedom Front Plus (FFP) of Pieter Mulder, himself a former CP MP in the apartheid era.
DA party officials say the area is about 80% white and largely Afrikaans- speaking. Its profile is mostly working class with much of the housing originally built for Iscor workers, many of whom have been retrenched.
The ward, part of the Emfuleni municipality (which includes Vereeniging) and once the seat of former President FW de Klerk, also includes flatland, much of it white, but with an upwardly-mobile black population moving into the previously whites-only group area.
DA candidate Nkhoro Edwin Makibinyane is a former deputy principal of the town’s Refengkhotoso Public School, who won a nomination contest for the DA candidacy.
His main opponent is Abraham Isak Jacobus ”Koos” Cato, a local businessman.
Although the FFP only received 2% of the vote last time, it sees the seat as winnable in a ward that is overwhelmingly ”Afrikaner”.
There is also an African National Congress candidate, Botai Stephen Nkatlo, but his party’s presence in the contest is seen only as a flag-waving exercise. — I-Net Bridge