”Do I look like a man who can climb up a lamppost?” demanded Sheval Arendse, the Democratic Alliance’s candidate in the Tafelsig by-election.
As Arendse weighs 150kg, the question, put to a police inspector investigating a complaint of theft by the Independent Democrats, was clearly rhetorical. The claim was that he had shinnied up the lamppost to remove ID posters in Mitchells Plain after dark.
The exchange provides an insight into both Arendse’s flamboyant character and a by-election campaign described as one of the dirtiest in Cape Town in 30 years.
Having won the seat for the ID in the March local election, Arendse defected to the DA in protest against his party’s informal cooperation pact with the African National Congress in the Cape Town metro council.
After a 40,5% poll on Wednesday, he regained the seat under his new party colours, with an overwhelming 67,9% of the vote against 29,5% for ID candidate June Frans.
The key consequence is that the DA-led multiparty coalition which governs Cape Town now has a clear overall majority. The coalition has 106 seats to the ANC-ID alliance’s 104. The Pan Africanist Congress, with one seat, is non-aligned.
Seeing it as a key test of coloured sentiment in relation to the two main non-ANC parties, and of the personal standing of DA mayor Helen Zille and ID leader Patricia de Lille, some observers dubbed it the most important by-election in a decade. It was the extremely high stakes for both parties that underpinned the bitterly acrimonious campaign.
Apart from the poster-theft allegations, Arendse was accused of pretending to be a policeman (he is a police reservist) and his wife was accused of fraudulently claiming child maintenance.
DA leader Tony Leon and the leader of the African Muslim Party (AMP), Wasfie Hassiem, laid charges of crimen injuria and fraud with the police after pamphlets accusing Leon and his wife of being ”Zionist oppressors” were distributed, using the AMP’s name and party letterheads.
Tafelsig is a poverty-stricken neighbourhood in the sprawling coloured township of Mitchells Plain, where children and scrawny dogs hang around street corners during the day and sandy backyards are full of washing lines, babies and old people.
The election campaign gave its 14 000 voters a brief spell of red-carpet treatment. Because of the precarious balance of power in the Cape Town council, most were individually canvassed and courted by Leon and De Lille. Zille also put in an appearance.
But the DA should not feel too secure — this is the second time Arendse has been aligned with the party and, in typical Cape Town style, he has been a member of at least four different political organisations since launching his political career 12 years ago.
He is unapologetic. ”I’m the man who caused this by-election — the coloured in the drinking water,” he grins. ”I think it might be a record — it’s the first time in the council’s history that a councillor resigns after 15 days because of a principle.”
The principle, he explained, was that he would never vote for the ANC. After winning the seat for the ID by a slender 146 votes in March, he resigned in April when his party voted with the ANC in the council.
”Patricia de Lille said in her election manifesto that the ID will not give power to the ANC and that she will not support the ANC’s mayoral candidate. One week later, she did exactly that. In my life I will not vote for the ANC, because us coloureds will always suck on the hind tit while the ANC is in power.”
Arendse denies that his objections to the ANC are racial. ”Some of my best friends are black,” he laughs. ”I’m not a racist, but under the whites we suffered and our people are still suffering. We’re still not getting jobs; our voices are still not heard. I’m a coloured and we’re marginalised — so how can we align ourselves with a political party who will continue to disregard us?”
A self-made man born in Retreat, Arendse says he threw stones at a police Casspir in 1976, but never became politically involved. After 28 years of service to the Cape Town municipality as a law enforcement officer he retired with a large pension payout and bought himself a white Mercedes Benz with customised number plates. He loves exotic birds and keeps a beautiful selection in his back yard — their twitters and chirps are as incongruous in this treeless, windswept landscape as the shiny Merc outside his humble house.
He calls his home in Tafelsig, where he has lived most of his adult life, the ”second police station”.
”Most of the cops at the Mitchells Plain police station are black and can’t write in Afrikaans. So the cops give people the forms and say they must write their own affidavits. Some days I write 60 affidavits a day.”
Arendse is a police reservist, a lay magistrate, commissioner of oaths and a paramedic, and he spends hours doing community service.
He enjoys his self-created role as a dispenser of favours, advice and support. Seekers of advice who beat their way to his backroom include tannies with electricity and water bill problems and tearful, pregnant teenagers, accompanied by their furious parents.
A small fridge in his office is stocked with milkshakes and his phones ring incessantly.
Arendse has been married twice and has four children. He insists, with a guffaw, that the only good thing that has happened under ANC rule is the scrapping of the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. ”That let me marry my present wife, who is white — or rather a poor white, as I call her.”