In a vote for the most stylish campaign headquarters, the Independent Democrats Cape Town mayoral candidate Simon Grindrod would win hands down.
Rosie’s coffee bar is a hipster’s delight, all retro furniture and burnt orange accents that echo the party livery. In the background, campaign manager Ali Mizra is learning to pull a decent espresso while new computers are installed.
The idea is to promote openess and accessibility: if you want a cappuccino you’ll have to pay for it, but anyone can drop in through the wide double doors and chew the fat.
All this plays to the ID’s second most obvious strength — its freshness. Twenty days worth of stumping in Cape Town from Patricia de Lille between now and March 1 plays to the most obvious.
How 35-year-old Grindrod himself fits into the ethos of the ID, and Cape Town’s awkward political environment, is less clear. His appearance is at odds with the surroundings: a hotel manager’s conservative suit speaks to his day job, along with hair neatly parted above a face that is going to be described as boyish for a good few years yet. His eyes are blue and intense, and his conversational style is resolutely serious.
The total effect is reminiscent of a young republican, and Grindrod’s political background tends to suggest some common ground with the GOP. He was founder in 1999 of the Association for the Restoration of Capital Punishment (Arcap), but insists this has no bearing on the mayoral race.
”That is a national issue, it is not any part of this campaign.”
Similarly, a flirtation with the social conservatives of the African Christian Democratic Party, based on their support for the death penalty rather than on broader affinities, he says.
But surely it is hard to square the social democratic values that the party is increasingly trying to articulate with his admiration for Margaret Thatcher?
”Lady Thatcher was detested by the lazy, the unproductive and the scroungers. She told us there is no such thing as a free lunch. She created a climate in which those who wished to work hard could prosper and those who expected handouts would not have it so easy,” he once wrote to a BBC website.
”Thatcher is a hero of mine,” he now says. ”So is Frank Sinatra, so is Madiba … the notion that my respect for these people has any bearing is absurd.”
Asked about his Christianity, he concedes a Methodist upbringing; indeed, his website makes a point of mentioning it, but he stresses that it is not important to his political role in heavily Muslim Cape Town.
Nevertheless, his approach does seem to emanate directly from the gospel according to Rudolf Giuliani, the tough, conservative, former mayor of New York. ”The city is a business and the citizens are its customers. City government is there to help you help yourself,” he says.
In an apparent contradiction with his party manifesto, which calls for a doubling of free water and electricity allocations with a ”compassionate” approach to arrears, Grindrod says free services should continue at current levels, but everyone should pay their bills. ”Proud people of Cape Town, of all communities, don’t want to feel like freeloaders,” he argues.
His priorities for the city stress law and order, attracting investment, and improved management of public services. He wants to recruit 1 000 additional city police officers, to drastically improve service levels within the city council and, as he puts it, restore pride to a city that has had its morale battered by maladministration. One step in that direction is his challenge to the other mayoral candidates to take a 30% pay-cut from about R750 000 to about R500 000. ”Do you need more?” he asks. ”The salary differentials in the council are almost as bad as in the private sector.”
The other side of the coin is a zero tolerance approach to petty crime, as well as laxity among council officials. Telephones must promptly be answered, entrance halls must be clean, staff must be properly trained and fairly treated. ”Rudolf Giuliani turned New York around by attacking the small things first. He created a new pride in the city. That is what is needed here.”
If he sounds breezily naive on the city’s intractable racial politics — ”the problem is politicians, not people”, he insists — he is also straightforwardly enthusiastic about a post viewed as a political death warrant. ”It is the most fantastic job you could imagine to head the city in which you were born.”
And he insists the ID is fighting to win, not just to hold the balance of power. ”In the unlikely event that we don’t win, we will act as a watchdog. No coalitions, and no compromise.”
Both the Democratic Alliance and African National Congress have failed in Cape Town to such an extent that inexperience is an advantage, Grindrod says.