The dining room still smells of smoke from the burnt curtains. The glass shards from the SABMiller and Savannah bottles used as petrol bombs are scattered across the bedroom and the dining room floors.
The damage was not as extensive as it would have been if all the bombs had gone off. But my sisters, who own the house, say that was precisely the point: a shot across the bows, a warning that anyone daring to associate with the African National Congress is asking for trouble.
No one dares sleep in the house now. The house of my childhood is a battered ghost — all because my youngest sister is an ANC ward candidate in Khutsong.
Here, anything remotely associated with the ANC becomes a legitimate target for community wrath. It is a township where, in past elections, the ANC has always won more than 75% of the votes.
Thus my sister, who has never been a councillor and had no part in the decision to incorporate the Merafong municipality into North West, carries the cross of the enemy.
The township is at war with itself. With the municipal offices, the library, shops and councillors’ houses burnt, there are no enemy targets left. So the rage is now directed at ANC candidates.
Only the ANC believes it can hold credible elections and win. Even if it happens, with the township a gutted shell, high schools at a standstill, people living in fear and friends and neighbours turning against each other, it would be a Pyrrhic victory.
Nothing suggests there can be free and fair campaigning, let alone balloting. At the moment, no political party is campaigning at all. There is not one poster in the township.
The ANC’s knight in shining armour, Mosiuoa ”Terror” Lekota, has succeeded only in further poisoning the atmosphere. After spending most of the week working with party structures wearing his hat as ANC national chairperson, he changed his headgear at the weekend. He called a ”government imbizo” for last Sunday in Khutsong, where he became defence minister.
The violence which erupted as a result of that meeting has fuelled new conflict, with local youths fighting against the amampondo who attended Lekota’s meeting. These are mainly former gold mine workers from the Transkei who are now staying in Khutsong’s informal settlements after being retrenched.
Lekota’s gung ho approach was doomed from the start. It included marching on a shebeen, confronting a teacher, Jomo Mogale, and accusing him of misleading residents.
Mogale says Lekota did not understand the demarcation issue and was hell-bent on gaining glory for himself as ”the man who sorted out Khutsong”.
The minister’s military approach to what is a burning political matter lies at the heart of residents’ concerns.
And where is the man who created this mess — Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi? It was Mufamadi, after all, who overrode the recommendation of the Municipal Demarcation Board that Khutsong and the broader Merafong municipality stay in Gauteng. The board’s findings were based on public hearings conducted on the spot. He also ignored the local government committee in the Gauteng legislature.
Of course, it was the ANC that decided the general principle of scrapping cross-border municipalities. But Mufamadi had a big say in how the municipalities would fall. He screwed it up, not only in Khutsong, but also in Matatiele and Moutse.
Mufamadi should not have created the impression that public input counted for anything if his attitude was always that government must be left to govern.
That he failed to anticipate the level of resistance in Khutsong is the fault of yet another layer of the ruling party. The local leadership of the ANC, led by the spineless Merafong mayor Des van Rooyen, failed to convey to their party seniors the depth of community dissatisfaction.
Although they initially stood by residents, they later saw their role as transmitting instructions from national to local structures, rather than the other way round.
The leaders of the Anti-North West Committee may be a motley band of South African Communist Party opportunists, wannabe and failed politicians, genuine community leaders and irresponsible rabble-rousers who deserve condemnation for the intimidation.
But the truth is that they exploited an issue that was handled badly by the ANC. It may be unruly youths who hurled the four petrol bombs that destroyed the soul of my family. But in the end, Mufamadi must take the blame.
The party should heed the words of Martin Luther King: ”Violent revolts are generated by revolting conditions. There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people who feel they have no stake in it; who feel they have nothing to lose.”
