Hole in the bucket: Interruptions in the supply of clean water may disrupt eThekwini’s December holiday season. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy
Thursday.
Another day, another move in the unending — and increasingly petty — political chess game that is being played by the parties in the ailing hung municipalities across South Africa.
Perhaps that should be snakes and ladders, given the amount of backstabbing and soul-selling that has been going on at council level in every single municipality where no party has the magic 50% plus one — and the temperament of those involved.
Towns and cities around Mzansi are battling for water — here in eThekwini, restrictions kick in later this month to try to avoid Day Zero ahead of the December holidays — but the political parties running the councils appear to be unaware of this.
eThekwini mayor Cyril Xbaba announced this week that supply would be restricted — in those homes that actually have it in their taps — because the city has been placed on terms for overconsumption by the national government.
Not the outcome that residents had hoped would be achieved by the flurry of presidential and provincial interventions in the city — or the clean-out in the mayor’s parlour — especially in the build-up to the festive season.
The city’s beaches haven’t been swimmable for more than a week at a time since its sewage treatment plants were destroyed, but the parties in council are still haggling over the division of key portfolios on the city’s executive committee.
Talks between the ANC and the Democratic Alliance over who gets what deadlocked several months ago.
The parties did manage to cooperate long enough to constitute a city leadership — they are people of the 15th after all — but their short-lived ability to see beyond their own immediate political needs ended there.
Elsewhere in our fine nation, the vibes are the same.
From Tshwane to Nongoma, Ekurhuleni to Theewaterskloof, the parties are similarly at it, switching alliances almost daily as they try to outmanoeuvre each other in search of power — and the keys to the respective city tills.
Potholes remain unfilled, bins unemptied and taps are dry, but instead of working together to deal with these problems, our political class are devoting their energies to playing musical chairs in council chambers around the country.
Johannesburg, our nation’s economic heart, has had more mayors than working traffic lights since 2016, courtesy of the inability of those individuals they voted for at council level to spend more time working than they do backstabbing one another, so the political manoeuvring goes on.
A fair part of the city is dependent on water tankers for survival as we speak, but its leaders are still too busy celebrating the installation of Dada Morero as mayor for the second time in August to have noticed.
Morero’s maiden term as mayor of the self-proclaimed centre of the universe in 2022 lasted a whole 25 days, before the courts overturned his election and reinstated Mpho Phalatse as Jozi’s citizen number one.
But what goes around, comes around, politically speaking, and Phalatse herself ended up being shown the door — again — through a no-confidence vote in January 2023.
Phalatse’s successor, Thapelo Amad from Al Jama-ah, didn’t last until May, while his replacement, Kabelo Gwamanda, was dumped to allow for the second coming of Morero.
This time around, Dada has already managed a whole month as mayor — as personal if not a party best — but one anticipates that his second term, like Phalatse’s, will end in tears and a new wearer for the city’s mayoral chain.
In Tshwane, ActionSA has turned on its moonshot coalition partner, the Democratic Alliance, and has teamed up with the ANC and the Economic Freedom Fighters — both of whom it swore it would never work with — to give mayor Cilliers Brink the boot.
Brink is gone, but the ANC and ActionSA have already fallen out over which of the parties will provide the mayoral candidate to replace Brink, which has to happen within 14 days of his removal.
The message from the voters on 29 May — do the job we elected you to, or jog on — appears to have been lost, or at least forgotten, by the parties, who claimed to have received the memorandum in the days after the last elections.
If it did, the message clearly hasn’t filtered down to the city-level operators across the political spectrum. Either that, or it has been rejected — or simply ignored — and the councillors have happily reverted to form.
Either way, we vote in council elections in less than a year and a half’s time, so those at the top of the ladder would be well advised to have a word with the snakes operating at the bottom.
Before it’s too late.