It’s time for ANC leaders to stop playing Russian roulette in South Africa’s municipalities.
There is a parasitic elite in the top echelons of the ANC who find profit in fanning fires in municipalities to cripple governance and destabilise the local state.
They sow discord and sometimes even fund protests by stakeholders who have either substantive or spurious complaints in one form or another.
The parasitic elite sometimes mobilises aggrieved stakeholders to burn infrastructure and hold municipalities to ransom.
Protest flares up in every pore of targeted municipalities.
These are stakeholders demanding a slice of municipal tenders with no sense of irony about the criminality of what they are demanding.
When we wake to municipalities in flames, infrastructure destroyed, offices burnt, we should know that sometimes the arson is orchestrated not by local communities but by the insatiable thirst of a parasitic elite.
Having accomplished their strategy, the parasitic elite often arrive draped in ANC leadership robes, feigning surprise at the state of decay and mayhem and hurriedly intervene to douse the odour of discord they in fact stitched together.
Their rescue mission never focuses on the heart of the complaints.
Instead, it rings in the changes at the institution’s top, removing mayors, municipal managers and most certainly chief financial officers from their posts.
Their intention is to ensure the slate is wiped clean.
Intransigent institutional leaders who impede the parasites’ accumulation agenda are removed and replaced by stooges who bend over backwards to line their patrons’ pockets with tenders.
Because the elite is sophisticated, it avoids appearing as direct beneficiaries of their own intervention, finding elaborate ways to hide their primary intention by avoiding getting tenders directly.
However, the parasites ensure those who fund their lavish lifestyle have the monopoly of tenders, or those who win tenders have no choice but to rent machinery from them.
Municipalities that have achieved back-to-back clean audits such as Ingquza Hill, Mhlontlo and Blue Crane Route have fallen prey to this mode of operation. So-called interventions in these municipalities were nothing but a ruse to hijack them in the end for one simple purpose – theft.
These municipalities are being press-ganged by certain ANC leaders to discard the nucleus of their municipal leadership and replace these officials with pliant substitutes who will be more willing to dance to the tune of the parasitic elite, particularly when it comes to the direction of tenders.
It is true that there are areas in which these municipalities can improve.
However, plunging them into chaos will not achieve this.
It will simply sink them.
For instance, how does it help these municipalities improve in areas where they are lacking if council meetings are called to focus not on service delivery but on the removal of municipal leaders who have not been found guilty or, for that matter, even accused of having fallen foul of the law?
How does it help to remove the municipal leaders and replace them with pliable substitutes who are easily swayed to take illegal decisions?
Municipal meetings, even with all their structural weaknesses, should serve an important role.
Using them wantonly as loaded guns against municipal leaders is problematic.
The capitalist state, whatever its weaknesses, remains an important instrument to ease the anguish of colonialism of a special type.
If well run, it can lessen the burden that weighs so heavily on the working class and the poor, who decidedly are black and African in this country.
The state should not be a place for some fork-tongued ANC leaders to destabilise institutions in order to further their narrow accumulation agenda.
It would be foolhardy for cattle to believe that lions have their best interests at heart.
A parasitic faction cannot have the best interests of the municipal coffers, or the communities that reside in the municipalities, at heart.
Although vexing, these occurrences are not surprising.
They arise out of the election into the echelons of leadership of a slew of business people who have spent their lives chasing money and profits, trampling on everything in their wake.
We cannot suddenly hope that these faction will mend their ways rather than run these institutions into the ground because of their incapacity to stop dancing to the tune of their stomachs.
If the parasitic elite in the ANC continues on this path, they are actually playing Russian roulette, because soon enough political office will blow up in their faces, as happened in the last local government elections in Nelson Mandela Bay. Yet, somehow, this elite remains convinced that their nefarious actions will pass unnoticed.
Lazola Ndamase is second deputy provincial secretary of the SACP in the Eastern Cape...