November 1, Independents’ Day

From the leafy banks of the Eerste River in Stellenbosch to the littered pavements of Riverside in the Free State town of Phuthaditjhaba, the way in which people look at local politics is changing.

Take property professional Bertus Swanepoel. He isn’t a politician, but a few weeks ago he was persuaded to run as an independent candidate for Stellenbosch ward 7 in the local government elections. It’s an area that includes established and affluent neighbourhoods such as Mostertsdrift and some of the university residences.

Swanepoel is one of a record 1,546 independent candidates (of a total 95,427) running for a council seat on November 1. It’s almost double the 855 independents who ran in 2016.

"For the past five years we’ve had a ward candidate who didn’t live in the ward," Swanepoel tells the FM. "They did good work, but people were frustrated. In principle, it’s a good thing to know your ward candidate, to bump into them when you drop your children at school or in the Spar. You can talk to them and hold them accountable."

Ward 7 is usually considered a slam dunk for the DA. After all, the party secured 97% of the vote there in 2016, with a voter turnout of 71%. But when the DA put up Annemarie Ferns — a candidate from outside the ward — as its candidate for this year’s poll, some residents revolted. They were, one of the residents says, especially irked by the way her candidacy was "imposed" on them.

As Ferns told a public meeting on October 15, DA MP and Stellenbosch constituency head Leon Schreiber had called her in about two weeks before and told her: "Annemarie, you get ward 7."

It was the kind of big-footing that didn’t sit well with the locals. "For us, it’s about the principle of building the government from the bottom up," Swanepoel says. It’s the reason he was persuaded to stand for the council seat.

Swanepoel, who has something of a reputation for taking up local issues with the municipality, says older people in the area long for the days when there was no party politics in council chambers. "It is what local government should be — giving account to the people who chose you, not to the political party," he explains.

Now, a number of people have told him they no longer want to vote for a political party to make decisions for them, only to have its members fight among themselves and with other parties.

"It really surprised me," he says. "Communities are looking for people whom they can trust."

Further afield, in Mpumalanga’s Steve Tshwete municipality, former mayor and guest house owner Ben Mokoena is among the founders of the Middelburg & Hendrina Residents’ Front. The group came into being only late last year, yet by May its candidate in ward 22 had drummed up a not-insignificant 20.8% of the vote for the ward by-election — second only to the ANC.

Mokoena is unhappy with how the ANC’s regional and provincial leadership has "imposed" municipal officials from other provinces, instead of drawing on the local skills that saw the municipality win awards under his leadership, from 1994 to 2001.

After speaking out against the ANC’s decisions, Mokoena and 12 others were expelled in 2001 — despite him having the community’s support, he says.

"I decided Middelburg comes first and the party comes second," he tells the FM.

Out of chances

Tucked away near the Lesotho border, in the former homeland of QwaQwa, is the municipality of Maluti-a-Phofung. Here, the situation is very different — but the sentiments residents express are similar.

Paul Masoeu is set to contest ward 25 of this Free State municipality under the banner of a small local group, called Map16. Like Mokoena, he was a member of the ANC — until he and some colleagues decided to part with the party after "seeing the corruption that persists in the organisation".

"We are trying to make them [the ANC] aware that what they are doing to the people of Maluti-a-Phofung is not good," he says.

Masoeu put in a decent showing for a first-time candidate in the May by-election in his ward. Though the ANC won the seat, he managed to do better than the more established EFF. Since then, he’s been campaigning hard.

The roads of ward 25 are potholed, and residents often lack water and electricity. Rubbish and sewage are regularly dumped in the river, from which people are forced to drink during the frequent water cuts.

In the street where Masoeu lives in Phuthaditjhaba, some old brick homes still sport the asbestos roofs that the province should have removed years ago, when Ace Magashule was premier. (The suspended secretary-general of the ANC is on trial with 15 others on charges of fraud, corruption and money-laundering in relation to that multimillion-rand tender.)

Maluti-a-Phofung is a poster child for SA’s failing municipalities, having received a disclaimed audit opinion for 14 of the past 15 years. (It avoided the same fate in 2015/2016 because it delayed the submission of its financial statements.) It’s one of 64 failing municipalities that the national government flagged in August, out of a total of 257.

Despite efforts by the national government to improve the bookkeeping in Maluti-a-Phofung, residents aren’t seeing any change.

"They [the ANC] say: ‘Give us another chance to rectify the mistakes,’" Masoeu says. "That we’ve done, and they’ve never rectified those mistakes. For the past 27 years they have been saying: ‘Give us another chance, we’ll deal with the problems that you’re encountering.’ Instead, the problems got worse and worse, so people don’t believe them any more."

Map16 came into being after the ANC expelled 16 of its councillors in 2018 for voting with the opposition against the ANC mayor, who they alleged was corrupt. In subsequent by-elections, these former councillors ran as independent candidates in 15 wards, going on to win 10 seats that had previously been considered wrapped up by the ruling party.

Ahead of November 1, Map16 has been registered as a political party — one of 325 contesting these elections, against 205 in 2016 — and its candidates will contest all 35 of the municipality’s wards.

It hopes to benefit from the ANC’s internal troubles, after the ruling party failed to register candidates in a number of wards in the municipality ahead of the Electoral Commission of SA’s initial registration deadline. This was rectified when the Constitutional Court ruled that elections could not be postponed, but that a new timetable should be set down.

The ANC wasn’t the only one to benefit from the reprieve offered by the Constitutional Court decision. In Harrismith, four individuals took advantage of the extended candidate registration deadline to put themselves forward as independents. They’re part of an apolitical group known as the Water Heroes — the result of residents taking it upon themselves to fix the town’s water woes.

Water Heroes convener Sam Twala is running for the ward 4 seat, while Petrus van Eeden is running in ward 6.

Van Eeden believes the Water Heroes have achieved what politicians couldn’t. Where "politicians and their parties failed to act", he says, the group’s members helped deliver basic services. And, he says, it’s brought the community together again.

The problem, in Van Eeden’s view, is that politicians "worry more about their parties than the voters". That’s partly why he takes issue with how the bigger parties, such as the ANC and DA, are telling voters not to support smaller parties and independent candidates.

A ‘discredited’ political project

Such an undermining of support could have meaningful consequences in a fractured municipality like Rustenburg, where smaller parties and independents together occupy three more seats than the ANC. The ANC governs the 89-seat municipality with the slimmest of majorities, having secured just 43 seats itself, by drawing in the African Independent Congress and Botho Community Movement, which each hold a seat.

But it’s perhaps telling that 31 independent candidates are running in the municipality’s 45 wards in these elections — almost six times the number of independents in 2016.

Taken together, the rise of smaller parties and independent candidates is an indication that "the bigger political project is discredited", says One SA Movement founder Mmusi Maimane.

Maimane, who resigned from the DA in 2019 after four years as its leader, has been lending administrative and political support to smaller parties and independents grouped into civic movements, helping them register for the local elections. His One SA Movement is preparing the ground ahead of expected changes in the electoral laws that will allow independents to run in national elections — and possibly even for president of SA.

"As the ANC collapses, municipalities are also collapsing. People are giving up on that as an ideal," he says. "It gives an opportunity for community-led organisations and candidates to stand, and the argument behind that is well-received within communities."

Maimane says the Covid lockdown has led to political parties withdrawing, while some took part in the looting of pandemic resources. In contrast, he says, community activists and independent politicians who were active in communities during this time "went on as normal, because they were not reliant on government machinery".

"Corruption has become so prolific," he says. "There’s really, at local government level, no cogent case why people should vote for the ANC."

Maimane reckons the DA has also become self-serving, claiming some candidates are running in as many as six wards to increase their chances of being elected.

There is, of course, a counter-argument: by running in more than one ward, candidates can garner additional votes for their parties, pushing up the proportional representation share of support and perhaps winning the party additional seats in council.

But it is perhaps worth considering his broader issue — the concern raised in Swanepoel’s Stellenbosch ward — about community and representation. "How can you lead people you don’t know or love?" Maimane asks. "Forget about ideology and local government — [local government] is not an ideological space."

That’s not a view shared by DA leader John Steenhuisen. Over the weekend he told those attending the party’s final elections rally to "forget about gimmicks like independent candidates who don’t stand for any particular values, policies or manifesto offers and cannot be held to account on any of these things once the votes are cast".

He also said smaller parties simply don’t have the numbers to keep the ANC and EFF out of government.

The growing lack of trust in the ANC has led to strong support for local organisations or independent candidates

—  What it means:

President Cyril Ramaphosa has taken a somewhat more generous approach, saying in his weekly newsletter on Monday that the new parties and candidates are "a sign of the health of our democracy". Still, as ANC leader, he’s been telling voters at small rallies around SA that the party wants to govern outright rather than in coalitions, and that voters should give the ANC another chance.

Convincing them may be a harder sell.

"The president, almost everywhere that we went, has been saying that we have made mistakes," says social development minister and ANC national executive committee member Lindiwe Zulu, who has been in the Free State trying to quell tensions related to the ANC’s choice of councillor candidates there.

"We don’t work towards being under 50 [percent support]," Zulu says — though she concedes that predications of a poor performance as a result of the ANC’s internal squabbles are not entirely out of place.

"People are not exaggerating in terms of the challenges that the ANC has faced," she says. "What is important for us to realise is what people are saying is real and true."

As discontent among the electorate grows, bigger political parties are fighting to stay out of the coalition zone, says political analyst Susan Booysen, editor of Marriages of Inconvenience: The Politics of Coalitions in SA. "Neither the ANC nor the DA is growing, and they know that they have to contain the split-offs, the fractioning and the chipping away here and there," she says.

There’s a reason the big parties are so concerned about the outright win: in national elections, smaller parties may make little difference to the bigger picture; in local elections, there really are big gains to be had.

Consider the Central Karoo district municipality, where the Karoo Gemeenskap Party’s Isak Windvogel became mayor last year. His party holds only one of six directly elected seats in the municipality — but the mayoral position was the party’s reward for jumping ship from a coalition with the DA to work instead with the ANC.

"They might only have one seat," Booysen says of the smaller parties and independents, "but they can leverage a massive amount of patronage. It means the principle of majority governance goes out the window.

"There is a new culture of micro-parties punching way above their weight. It works for them — they get mayoral chains or speaker positions," she explains.

"Times have never been so good for these small parties as they are now."