What is the meaning of the upheavals in Khutsong, the mining township west of Johannesburg that has forced itself from obscurity into the headlines? In this ruling party stronghold, residents burnt homes of election candidates of the African National Congress. They almost ran ANC chairman Mosiuoa Lekota out of town last week and plan to boycott next Wednesday’s election.
Emergency talks are in progress to get Khutsong to the polls and to allow free and fair elections. Did it have to come to this?
Residents do not want to move to the North West for reasons both mythical and factual. Fact: North West spends more slowly than Gauteng, so services may reach Khutsong at an even slower pace. Fact: Gauteng has a more dynamic leadership, and there is a sense that things are happening. Myth: Teachers will be paid less depending on which province they fall under. Myth: Pensions will have to be collected in far-away Mafikeng.
But more important than all of this is the fact that the people of Khutsong believe that democracy means they have a say in how they are governed, and by whom.
The government’s standard response has been to say there will be no decline in the quality of services offered to residents. Indeed, the perceptions of respective provincial governments’ capacities to deliver services may be incorrect — but the rub lies in how the concerns are addressed. And it is in this way that the ANC mandarins have failed Khutsong.
The ANC likes to think of itself as the custodian of democracy because of its history as the country’s liberator from apartheid. That is fair enough. But it is also why the ruling party should be held to the highest standards of democratic practice. Arrogance and high-handedness should have no place. The people of Khutsong painstakingly went through all the institutional steps to have their voice heard.
The Municipal Demarcation Board agreed with their arguments, but the government rode roughshod over the board’s decision and the people’s wishes. Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi has never once bothered to address the community to explain what President Thabo Mbeki this week called a “misunderstanding”. Not once.
The travails of Khutsong symbolise the problems inherent in trying to run a technocratic state where too much power is vested in bureaucrats who take decisions without listening sufficiently.
This is the Awuleth’ ilaptop yam (Bring me my laptop) brigade, who rely on PowerPoint presentations rather than the time-tested political skills of listening and accountability. The laptop brigade wave away protests, insisting that over time people will accept their lot. This will not work — and neither will the muscle-flexing tactics Lekota tried when he descended on the township last week.
There is no justification for this week’s violence against public and private property, and those guilty of it must face the full force of the law. But the future also cannot lie in the click of a laptop mouse. Rebuilding trust will require that the government return to the drawing board and listen. It is a lesson for Khutsong, and a key lesson for the country as it moves to reshape local government after next week’s election.
A quilt rather than a blanket
Regulating foreign land ownership in South Africa is not a totalitarian crime against the free market, as some special interests — notably estate agents — have suggested this week. As our coverage shows, the principle is applied very widely across the world, including in some model democracies.
Not many countries have a blanket ban on foreign buying, but most want to protect the interests of their nationals in some way. Countries with successful regulation rely on a mixture of solutions, encouragingforeign direct investment at the same time as protecting the rights of citizens.
As the government-appointed panel which investigated the issue pointed out, solutions could include long-term leases for foreigners, restrictions on the quantity of land they can buy, offering citizens first option, introducing a state permit system, and imposing restrictions along our coastline and other environmentally sensitive areas.
It is quite clear that countrywide restrictions would not be needed in South Africa. Far more to the point would be restrictions in areas where there is a desperate need for land and where foreign buying may have helped push up prices and put residential property beyond the means of ordinary South Africans — notably the Cape Peninsula — and clamps on undesirable, foreign-funded development. In the latter category is the plethora of golf and polo estates, particularly in coastal areas. An over-supply of such developments is not in the national interest for a range of reasons, most particularly their wanton use of irrigation water in a semi-arid country where millions of people lack water for the basic necessities of life.
The issue clearly needs further research. But we should not make the mistake of ruling out restrictions of some kind on ideological grounds alone.