Chris Pappas was a politician on the rise in 2021. He’d turned 30 in late August and was deputy provincial leader of the DA in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) and mayoral candidate in local elections that year. He wasn’t given much chance of winning, even in the uMngeni municipality (Howick), where voters were showing signs of being fed up with the governing ANC’s failure to deliver services.
When he prevailed, the ANC refused to step aside, and Pappas needed to get a high court ruling to get its officials out.
He may have another fight on his hands. Pappas and his supporters are ready to resist a forced amalgamation of their municipality with its two dysfunctional neighbours, Mpofana (Mooi River) and Impendle, which lies to the west of Pietermaritzburg. All three municipalities are part of the uMgungundlovu district in the KZN midlands.
Pappas’s achievements since winning include settling municipal debts, stabilising finances and improving corporate governance and service delivery. His success has not gone down well with the ANC. According to his party, he is often the target of “spiteful” attacks by the local ANC hierarchy. When Pappas, who is fluent in Zulu, criticised the provincial government for delaying school-feeding programmes, calling the ANC amaselesele (frogs), he was accused of being a “racist boy” by KZN ANC chair Siboniso Duma.
Pappas is more concerned about the possibility that his pond will be swallowed up by the two struggling neighbours than about amphibian insults. In the 2021 local elections, the DA, with Pappas as candidate, won 47.4% of the 30,860 uMngeni votes that were cast (it has 54,063 registered voters) to the ANC’s 39.2%. The DA governs with the help of independents, who won 3.8%. In the 2016 election the ANC had won 55.67%, and it was returned with solid majorities in Mpofana and Impendle in 2021.
Before the DA takeover of uMngeni in November 2021, it had been flagged as financially at risk, and Pappas says he found the municipality to be in crisis mode and run by demotivated individuals. It has since had a R53m budget approved for the 2022/2023 financial year and money has been allocated for service delivery, maintenance and infrastructure development.
Pappas says his focus is uMngeni. He decided not to stand for re-election as the DA’s deputy leader in KZN, because he has much to do in his own backyard. “I hold no position in my party. I am an ordinary member, yet I am the mayor of a municipality. In other political parties, your government title is often linked to your party title, which causes huge instability. It also doesn’t lead to the best people for the jobs filling positions,” he says.
There has to be a change of systems and approach
— Chris Pappas
He is scathing about the shortcomings of the provincial government. He says constant cabinet changes, factionalism and the fear of the loss of a provincial title that may prevent promotion to national government all stand in the way of prioritising important issues, allocating resources and delivering meaningful change.
“You end up with a situation of a lot seeming to be happening on paper, but when you look at the lived experience of people on the ground, things are getting worse, not better.”
Pappas says the only change possible is likely to be “big small change” as has happened in Howick. He says only the smaller municipalities are able to address on-the-ground issues that larger municipalities are too cumbersome to handle. But with a 40% rates-based income, even uMngeni has limited funds to intervene in service delivery beyond “putting a finger in the proverbial dyke”.
Pappas says: “When you look at how places like Pietermaritzburg and Durban are structuring their budgets and see the interventions they’re putting in place and the types of loans they are taking, you realise that the cities are bankrupt and can’t respond. If you consider the sanitation issues in eThekwini after last year’s storm and the cash flow problems within the Msunduzi municipality, you realise that fundamental things are wrong. There has to be a change of systems and approach in those spaces.”
Redrawing the midlands municipal boundaries and incorporating two municipalities with little income but substantial needs would plunge uMngeni into a similar position, Pappas says.
He says that as national and provincial governments fail, communities and businesses turn to local municipalities “because we are closest to them. You can’t WhatsApp the president, but you can storm the mayor’s office.” And Pappas expects to still be in that office if it’s stormed.
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