Political scientists suggest voters in the Western Cape are more likely to consider alternatives in this election. This is the first in a series of provincial election reports
Tourists come to the Western Cape for its dramatic landscapes, but in this election year the real excitement is etched into the political map.
Consider the veritable Mount Rushmore that is the list of candidates for premier.
The front runner is clearly Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille, who has used her platform as executive mayor of Cape Town to build an image of incorruptible efficiency, shrugging off attacks from the ANC and inside her own party with a show of granitic indifference.
She will likely need to govern in coalition — the DA’s own polling data suggests the party will win a plurality — perhaps 40% — but not an outright majority.
Vying for a seat at the table will be Independent Democrats leader Patricia de Lille, who has concentrated her party’s limited resources in the Cape, and Allan Boesak, whose soaring oratory and tainted past present potential Congress of the People (Cope) voters with an awkward choice.
The ANC has never won the Western Cape outright and only controls it now thanks to floor crossing in the provincial legislature. Even party die-hards concede it is unlikely to retain that control — internal polling suggests that a staggering 59% of voters actively disapprove of the party.
A portion of the antipathy is historical — and it is impossible to dismiss the anxieties of some coloured voters, particularly the urban working class, and better-off whites about the ANC’s ”transformation” agenda, which many see as unjustly favouring Africans — but it has dramatically worsened thanks to the vicious factional battles that have torn the provincial party apart.
The ousting of premier Ebrahim Rasool in 2008, long planned by provincial chair Mcebisi Skwatsha and his right-hand man Max Ozinsky, was ultimately made possible by local powerbrokers whose influence at national level was boosted after the ANC’s Polokwane conference: Tony and Lumka Yengeni, and former Cape Town mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo. Rasool’s ouster closely mirrored the sacking of then-president Thabo Mbeki, and had similar effects — branches defected wholesale to Cope, and confusion prevails over who will lead the party into the 2009 elections. Will the party pick a coloured premier candidate such as Rasool’s successor, the low-key Lynn Brown; will election coordinator Chris Nissen, compromised by his relationship with Brett Kebble, continue his return to prominence; or will Skwatsha finally get his hands on the prize?
Skwatsha is first on the party’s list, reflecting the preferences of the provincial executive, but Brown is second, and Luthuli House — clearly nervous that Skwatsha will alienate a broad swath of traditional ANC voters of all races — is insisting that it will decide on the candidate.
So although the DA, ID and Cope go into battle with three of the most recognisable faces in the province, the ANC remains at sixes and sevens.
De Lille overplayed her hand with disastrous consequences following the 2006 municipal poll, when she narrowly failed to win the balance of power in Cape Town, and briefly formed a coalition with the ANC — provoking howls of outrage from voters. She has clawed back some of that support with a determined campaign of grassroots work in areas such as Mitchells Plain and won several by-elections that were contested by the DA and the ANC.
Boesak remains popular, despite his fraud conviction, and can stir a crowd like few other politicians. His ability to call up the legacy of the United Democratic Front will appeal to many of those middle-class coloured voters who in the past voted ANC, and he may be able to woo the rural workers in towns such as Worcester who have traditionally voted for the party. Cope has strong organisers too, in township areas such as Langa.
Whether Zille would be able to live with Boesak as a coalition partner is less clear. Cope appeals to her as a relatively liberal and non-racial opposition alternative, but she will be deeply uneasy about cooperating with such a tainted figure — albeit one who has been pardoned.
Zille has difficulties of her own with a fractured party — regional kingpins such as Western Cape leader Theuns Botha are dead set against her efforts to remake the DA in a more liberal mould, but she has thus far managed to contain them.
The fractured politics of the Western Cape is often put down to its perennial tardiness — stuck in the past, unable to disentangle itself from a poisonous apartheid and legacy, the local electorate votes its fears, its resentments, its ethnic identification, rather than its hopes, it is often suggested.
There is no escaping the fact that the province’s ethnic mix sets it apart from the rest of the country and strongly shapes its politics, but the dynamics of race are complicated by the boundaries between social classes, language groups, city and countryside. Migration, too, is constantly altering the terms of any calculation, from hospital budgets to likely voting patterns.
The province has just more than four million residents, about 2.2-million of them coloured, around 900 000 African and 700 000 white. Although the proportion of whites in the mix has been steadily declining since the end of ”influx control” and job reservation laws designed to keep Africans out of the region, it remains unusually high compared to other provinces, and there will be a substantial coloured majority for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile concerns about the impact on budgets and service delivery of migration to the province from the impoverished Eastern Cape are so tinged with racial anxieties that policymakers find it difficult to address them head-on.
If a credible coalition government does emerge from these elections, however, it may be a sign that for once the Western Cape is ahead of the national trend — its voters are ticking ballots not just as an expression of an intertwined race, class and political identity, but as an active choice about the future of the region. Research by political scientist Lawrence Schlemmer suggests that they are more ready than ever to consider alternatives.
Certainly they have reason to choose carefully, as the Western Cape is powerfully exposed to the global economic downturn. Long-haul tourism, advertising and film-making, ship chandling and repair, wine and fruit growing are all buffered by a weaker rand, but not enough to offset plummeting global demand. Financial services, another traditional mainstay of the province, is in deep decline. High property values, which for a decade have underpinned a major construction boom, are now falling in real and nominal terms.
All this will make it even harder to repair a seriously frayed social fabric: a housing shortage the provincial government puts at 400 000, a health system cracking under the strain of HIV/Aids and tuberculosis, and the worst substance abuse and violent crime problem in the country.