New start for council

THE countdown for getting rid of politicians in the running of strife-torn Molteno and Sterkstroom for the next three months has begun.

Placing the Inkwanca municipality, the smallest in the province, under Section 139 (1)c administration is a first for the Eastern Cape.

Next Monday, a yet to be named administrator with a team of five will arrive in the two-town municipality and, much like crank starting the ubiquitous Lister farm pump, will attempt to get the wheels turning where politicians have failed.

Stanley Khanyile, superintendent-general of the Eastern Cape department of cooperative governance and traditional affairs (Cogta), says on that day all six councillors – five from the ANC, including the defiant mayor, Mthandazo Qamngwana, and one from the DA – will “have gone home”.

And for about three months after that, Molteno with its estimated 20000 residents and Sterkstroom with its 10000 people, will live in political limbo, protected by one of the greatest constitutions on earth, while governance through councillors, wards, council meetings and the like, will have dissipated like dust devils spinning over the Karoo.

Signs of this interregnum were all about this week.

By Tuesday, the two heavy-looking men standing guard outside Qamngwana’s temporary mayoral office in Sterkstroom’s main street had gone. The former mayor and his cohort of four councillors and some municipal officials spent the morning hanging out and talking in the dusty backyard.

The mayor was not taking calls but his personal assistant was seen filling up the smart mayoral SUV.

But this superficial inertia belies the tension that has been escalating unattended in the service-starved municipality for two years, and which inevitably would erupt.

As indeed it has.

If ever there was a symbol of how tense, terrible and dysfunctional life and politics had become in Inkwanca, it was when Cogta MEC Fikile Xasa was told by phone as he drove to Sterkstroom on the R397 last Wednesday to keep on going and not attend a meeting he had called because his life would be in peril.

It was at the meeting that he planned to announce the dissolution of Inkwanca.

Xasa was told to head for Molteno instead. Had he ventured into Sterkstroom he would likely have encountered a welcome committee – an ANC splinter faction linked to Qamngwana wielding sticks, pangas, cricket bats and a hand gun.

They were intent on derailing the MEC’s meeting to which Qamngwana’s political foe, Luzuko Yalezo, who is also in the ANC but differently aligned, had been invited along with a committee of 25 Molteno civic representatives that straddled race, political and economic divides and included farmers, NGK clergy and tripartite alliance organisations.

The decision to disband the municipality flowed from a forensic investigation into the chaotic state of the finances and continual water and power outages. The Kabuso report and its remedies were rejected by the mayor, even after a court order to fix the mess.

Faced with legal challenges from the mayor, Xasa and his officials churned their way through the provisions of a 139-provincial intervention, while tensions between two sides within the ANC built up. As this happened service delivery trickled to levels that rendered business and the community non-functional. Both factions have accused each other of instigating violence. Qamngwana is adamant he is the victim of factionalism in his own party and that his only mistake was to support the wrong candidate in the last ANC provincial election.

In an interview with the Dispatch he launched a verbal attack on Yalezo’s ANC faction accusing the latter of last year leading Sanco members and 42 striking Inkwanca employees on a mission to make Molteno, the seat of the municipality, ungovernable. He claimed the homes of at least four of Qamngwana’s faction were damaged or destroyed and that Molteno had spiraled down into a “no-go” war zone last year.

Qamngwana also claims 15 Molteno-based Inkwanca employees “sabotaged” the municipal computer server and waged war on service delivery, finally forcing him to flee his mayoral office to his hometown of Sterkstroom.

Yalezo’s counter claim is that Qamngwana has abused state resources, and willfully allowed electricity, water and sewage to collapse in Molteno, while forming a private political crowd to protect himself.

Yalezo and others on his side claim the mayor controls an employment list for youths in Sterkstroom who only get public and community works programme jobs, and even private jobbing, if they serve as his political foot soldiers.

Farmers and business owners in Molteno also claim the Qamngwana faction wanted to “turn Molteno back into a farm”.

The four ANC branches in Molteno and Sterkstroom are intensely divided, and it is difficult to know which is causing the violence. However, as the Section 139c dissolution process advanced this month, so did the upheaval on the ground in both dorps.

Four political events revealed the schism between the two factions and the shifting ground:.

lOn Thursday, September 4, the Molteno (Yalezo) faction organised a mass blockade of the R56 through Molteno. But in a new move, they opted for a broad crossover political approach last used by the United Democratic Front 30 years ago when it took the Eastern Cape by storm and rolled out mass action.

From 1984 to 1986 Port Elizabeth township-based civic structures led by now-ANC chief whip Stone Sizani, mobilised by reaching across town to draw in whites opposed to apartheid repression and businesses who were being hammered by the social collapse.

In a retrospective microcosm of this strategy, in the build-up to the Molteno blockade and march, the ANC faction held a series of meetings last month with representatives of over 30 white farmers in the district, white Molteno business owners and township residents and even shared a Sunday church service at the Molteno NG Kerk.

This was new territory, with white and black residents saying how empowered they felt by this fresh unity.

The final big march and blockade of the R56 was an oddly joyous and law-abiding occasion. It was surreal to see farmers roll their tractors and trailers across the busy Transkei-Cape Town R56 route while a public order police officer and march organisers huddled together nearby as they agreed on the rules.

The ANC crowd, in typical political dress and with banners waving, toyi-toyed out from town to meet well-dressed young and old white residents. Eight of the whites were from a local retirement home. They were seated in chairs in the back of a banner-bedecked truck, and said they were taking part in their first mass march ever.

This throng, led by a row of police in smart navy overalls, seemed proud and focused. When they reached the other end of town, Yalezo delivered a rousing speech from the back of a lucerne trailer, and again on the steps of the municipal offices in Molteno, where there were also interdenominational prayers and the singing of the national anthem.

•  The second political event was by the Qamngwana faction in Sterkstroom, and surprise, surprise, organised for the very same day as the Molteno blockade and march. Early that Thursday morning, while the Dispatch team watched the Molteno blockade being set up, Qamngwana was on the phone to me demanding that we drive to Sterkstroom right away to report on the meeting of his crowd gathered in Masakhe Hall.

But the late arrival in Molteno of Cogta deputy-director general Ngwadi Mzama and residents of Molteno eager to tell the Dispatch how dysfunctional life in Inkwanca had become meant we only reached the Sterkstroom meeting late in the afternoon.

At Masakhe community hall an official pointed out the mayor with his councillors standing in a huddle in the grounds. The mayor was grumpy and seemingly slighted, and his crowd had to be roused.

Placards were handed out stating “hands off our mayor” and the singing and chanting got going for the benefit of a lone Dispatch reporter and photographer.

•  At the third event on Sunday September 7, the two factions clashed in Sterkstroom. Here, Yalezo’s faction was represented by Luleka Gubela, co-ordinator of the ANC’s sub-regional task team supposedly set up to prepare for the Bhisho takeover.

Qamngwana scoffed at her task team saying he did not recognise it. While the mayor’s group met in Masakhe hall, Gubela’s smaller group gathered on a derelict tennis court nearby.

The two groups came together and stones flew.

Gubela, the smartly groomed principal of Sterkstroom’s Eluthuthu primary school, said she then adopted Mahatma Ghandi’s politics of passive resistance and told her group to sit on the ground and silently face their critics. She said this seemed to take the wind out of the other group, who “left without listening to what we had to say”.

Qamngwana denies he was present, but Gubela claims she saw him with his group which approached her group. She also alleges one of his councillors, Ntsikelelo Qibi, threw a stone which smashed the tail light of her bakkie, and said a taxi used by her group had its back window smashed.

Qamngwana and Qibi are adamant they were not on the scene. However, Qibi does admit: “I saw a group of people on the tennis court, but I did not stone anyone’s car. I was not part of those things.”

Police are investigating three cases of malicious damage to property, but no arrests have been made.

And so it was that MEC Xasa drove to Sterkstroom last week Wednesday to meet both factions and representatives from both towns and to tell the mayor and his councillors that, essentially, the provincial executive’s decision was one that would leave them jobless.

Predictably the news would be greeted in the same measure as when a pin is pulled from a grenade.

While Xasa never made it to Sterkstroom the Molteno faction and committee of 25 approaching the mayor’s temporary offices were suddenly surrounded by men brandishing weapons who had being lying in wait in shops and side streets.

On the phone to the Dispatch, Molteno’s Mandy Aucamp, who project manages the state-supported job-creation raspberry farm, Berry Nice, was terrified as she described men wielding pangas who appeared from shops “throwing sh*t at us”.

Molteno Farmers Association leader Meyburgh Erasmus saw a handgun flash. Inkwanca housing development officer Thembelani Ndevani, one of Qamngwana’s key Molteno opponents, had a stone hurled into his back.

The Yalezo ANC faction and their committee of 25 ran for their cavalcade of cars and headed the same way as the MEC had to Molteno town hall. There Xasa told a capacity crowd the Inkwanca council was dissolved.

This was only partially true.

Khanyile said the legally required notices of dissolution were only submitted by the provincial executive to Cogta Minister Pravin Gordhan and Scopa on Monday, three days later, and now the 14-day countdown is on until the notice takes effect.

Khanyile admits Inkwanca will exist in a twilight for the next 12 days. It seems unlikely that Qamngwana will leave office until he gets an official notice of dissolution.

Earlier this week an inertia and stillness – a tattered form of peace – had descended on both towns. Who knows what it will be like today. –– mikel@dispatch.co.za