From activist to politician: how one woman is making a difference

Sannieshof is a small dorpie with enormous problems, located in the similarly troubled — and recently dissolved — North West municipality of Tswaing.

The issues themselves are nothing new, says resident Carin Visser: it’s 18 years since she first realised the extent of the trouble in town, when her son visited from the UK and expressed shock at the state of disrepair.

"We had become acclimatised to the deterioration that happened here," she says of the small farming community her grandfather helped establish in 1928. "I’m the last here of the Van Wyk family, and I felt that I couldn’t let this happen," she tells the FM.

It was a realisation that led the flower distributor and chair of the town’s garden club to become an activist, and later an MP — all the while making a noise about the lack of water and sanitation in the town.

It began with Visser writing letters to the town’s mayor. When these went unanswered, she decided to take the matter to Edna Molewa, then premier of North West.

But first Visser visited the nearby informal settlement so she could be sure to tell the premier the whole water story. There she met a mother of five who said women were being raped every night, as they had to walk kilometres in the dark to fetch water from the communal tap. (The woman herself had contracted HIV and died two years later.)

The story spurred Visser to action. "I realised I had to do what was right and justified," she says. "If I failed to act on the plight of the people of Sannieshof, I would have missed my mission."

But even her visit with Molewa proved fruitless — though the premier expressed shock at Sannieshof’s water and sanitation problems, she did nothing to change the situation, says Visser.

By 2007, the town’s residents had become reliant on water trucks. It pre-empted the first rates boycott in SA, with the residents’ association using money that would have gone to the municipality to fix broken water infrastructure instead.

For her efforts, Visser was arrested — three vans, with sirens wailing, came for her — and issued with a fine. "I wasn’t aggressive," she says, "but I was agitated that things could be so wrong."

Eventually the Sannieshof story reached the media, and Helen Zille, who was DA leader at the time, approached Visser to run as a proportional representation councillor in the municipality in the 2011 elections.

Visser didn’t know much about local government at that point, but she started educating herself, reading the constitution and other relevant legislation. She won office again in 2016, but moved to the provincial legislature in 2018 to fill the vacancy left by then DA MPL Joe McGluwa’s resignation.

By 2019, Visser had moved another rung up the political ladder, with her inclusion on the DA’s national electoral list. Today she’s an MP in the National Council of Provinces.

In Visser’s view, it’s important for politicians to start off as activists and to remain rooted in their communities. But, she says, she’s realised that "you can reach a ceiling [as an activist]; you can only do so much, and then you cannot go further. You need to have inside information, and you need to have a network."

Still, she considers herself an activist at heart — someone who "gets things done".

"You have to have this [ability to care] about people, and the patience to work with them, because it’s not easy to do ... When people phone you, you’re the first line of defence, because you’re the first person to answer the telephone."

Visser’s children don’t live in Sannieshof any more, but she still feels driven to improve the town — and to help people from other towns too.

"The biggest thing, in the end, is that you work with people who have begun losing hope," she says.

Today, businesses in the town have started closing down, and the last group of doctors left when their sonar machines burnt out for the third time because of power surges due to unreliable electricity supply.

With the exodus of businesses, unemployment has increased. And desperation has risen in the wake of the Covid lockdowns. "People are so hungry. We have an absolute crisis on our hands," she says.

The solution, to Visser’s mind, is to put in power "people who will stand up and stand together with people who will work and build together". That means getting residents out to vote come November 1.

It’s the least they can do, she says, to "empower those who can help strengthen the council".