'People were hungry for change': Saving South Africa is News24's Book of the Month for May

The DA won control of the uMngeni Municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands after the local government elections in 2021. As the only DA-run municipality in KZN, uMngeni shows how local government could work in a post-ANC South Africa.

Written by two leaders at the very heart of the project, Saving South Africa reveals the challenges, triumphs and disasters the new administration encountered. It is a story of incompetent officials, political spies, gun-wielding tenderpreneurs, petty theft and grand larceny. And yet, as Chris Pappas, DA mayor of uMngeni, and Sandile Mnikathi, deputy mayor, show in Saving South Africa, there is always hope for a better future as the corrupt layers of local governance are stripped away.

In this edited excerpt, Pappas and Mnikathi describe winning the municipality, the ANC's obstruction of the transition, and the malfeasance they found in uMngeni.

uMngeni is a fairly typical South African municipality, with population groups still dictated to a large extent by apartheid spatial planning. Hilton is an affluent town, with prominent private schools cheek by jowl with more down to earth educational establishments catering for the local, less privileged populace. The township of Sweetwaters lies between Hilton and Pietermaritzburg, and it is here that the majority of ANC support in the area lives.

Howick and Nottingham Road are not as obviously wealthy as Hilton, but they also have large townships within easy reach, the largest of which is Mpophomeni. As with Sweetwaters, Mpophomeni is traditionally an ANC stronghold. In the last two decades, Howick has become a magnet for retirees and, more recently, new families.

A group of retirement communities, known collectively as The Ambers, has grown up in the town, offering secure living and frail care for senior citizens at a price. People who live in The Ambers are almost exclusively white, and mostly DA voters, but there aren't enough of them to outvote the ANC-dominated voters in the townships. If the opposition was going to become the incumbent following the 2021 elections, it had to find a way around that fact.

Winning uMngeni was not a fluke for the DA. They had done their due diligence in the year leading up to the elections to the extent that when other parties were starting to emerge from the cocoon of Covid-19 restrictions, the DA was wrapping up its campaign.

Chris Pappas had an idea what was coming at an early stage. He said, 'We had a good understanding about the political dynamic in KZN and in the country. First of all, in uMngeni we were only 9% away from being the majority party. Around 8% of our vote came from black South Africans in this area, so it wasn't just old, white people, as the stereotypes go. Importantly, the ANC do not learn from their mistakes; they keep doing the same thing over and over until voters either don't vote for them or change their vote.

'The dislike of Cyril Ramaphosa, the factions in the ANC, the corruption and the work that we did around registration (where we got previously unregistered voters in this area out in their thousands), all these things added up to a point where you do all the calculations, and the win starts to become a real possibility.'

***

The change of governance in the uMngeni Municipality had its roots in the steady decline of South Africa during the so-called state capture years, but there was one specific moment that changed everything. Three months before the local government elections of 2021, the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) released a report detailing fraud in the use of municipal funds during the Covid-19 lockdown of the previous year.

Subsequently, the uMngeni municipal manager, Thembeka Cibane, was suspended at a council meeting, a decision that would affect much of the DA takeover of the municipality three months later. The SIU report alleged that Cibane had irregularly processed the utilisation of R20-million earmarked for Covid-19 alleviation projects, and it recommended disciplinary action and criminal charges against her. The report detailed how the money was siphoned off by hand-picked companies, without following supply-chain management policies.

Sandile Mnikathi remembers how it affected voters. He said, 'Politically aligned people in uMngeni were helping themselves to funds that were supposed to alleviate the suffering inflicted by Covid-19. That was really when the ANC did themselves in. You were then able to go into places like Mpophomeni to talk to people, and there was no hostility. After the SIU report, the mood was very, very different in uMngeni.'

It was a difference that would catapult the DA to governance, but there was a problem. The problem was that the ANC was simply not used to giving up power. In the weeks prior to and following the November 2021 elections, the ANC in uMngeni tried everything to remain in control. They were hamstrung, though, by the fact that two separate and competing ANC factions had emerged in the municipality, one that backed Cibane, the other that wanted their own person in her place. Consequently, said Pappas, 'We didn't actually have a day one in the office; we had an inauguration that failed to sit. This was exactly what we thought would happen and meant that we spent the first week in court.

'South African law says that you have to be sworn in within 14 days of the election, so in order to frustrate that process the ANC tried to make sure the council was not sworn in timeously, therefore rendering the election null and void. The outcome of that would be that we would need to have a fresh election in the municipality.'

When Cibane was suspended, the previous council had put in place an acting municipal manager, Sandile Buthelezi, but Cibane wasn't giving up her position without a fight. Cibane appeared at the meeting that was due to hand over the reins to the DA and claimed to be in charge. She told Buthelezi to go and sit with the other general managers, while she ran the meeting. Her suspension had stripped her of any legitimacy. Said Mnikathi, 'She actually wasn't even allowed to be on the municipal premises, let alone trying to preside over the meeting.'

Ultimately, the DA and the EFF staged a walkout on advice received from someone with a legal background. Pappas said, 'An observer from one of the government departments came to us on the side and said to forget the pomp and ceremony, if you really want to be sworn in, go to the Magistrate's Court. To an extent, I think that showed that across the board, people were hungry for change, whether it was ordinary people in the higher levels of government, your clerks, the police, whoever it might be.'

At the Magistrate's Court, there was more obstruction. Each councillor had to sign an oath of office, but one of the municipal clerks said that they couldn't find the appropriate forms. Mnikathi recalls, 'We asked the IT manager, who is the branch secretary in one of the Mpophomeni wards, to please print our pledges. The manager refused, even though there was no reason for him to say no.

'But one of the committee clerks from the previous administration was also done with all this politicking and the nonsense that was going on, and she helped us, saying, "I'll go and get them for you; they are on my computer," and she brought them to us. She said, "Here are the forms; how many more do you need?" I think she had received a directive from one of the managers to not print out the forms, but she said, "I'm bringing these to you because it's the right thing to do." So, there are good officials in the municipality who know what the right thing is to do.

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It was the beginning of the end for Cibane's time at uMngeni, but as has become traditional within ANC structures, she was quickly redeployed. Pappas said, 'Amazingly, she is now the administrator in Mangaung, Bloemfontein. So, a person who has currently got an SIU case against them, which is registered with the police, and who drove a municipality into the ground, financially, structurally and capacity wise, has been promoted by the ANC.

'She came to uMngeni from a municipality that had no rates, minimal infrastructure and a tiny administration – Ndwedwe. She was driven out of Ndwedwe, she was driven out of uMngeni, and she is now the administrator in a metro, deployed by national government. It's just a farce, really. Her proximity to the previous premier of KZN, Sihle Zikalala, is what made her untouchable. Zikalala (now the Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure) also comes from Ndwedwe, and his faction was the Jacob Zuma faction at that time. He is now a Ramaphosa guy. He flip-flops wherever he needs to go, but his faction in uMngeni would defend Cibane, because of the premier's influence. The premier and the ANC could then give favours to other people through the office of the municipal manager.

***

Eventually, the time came to formally take office. Understandably, many of the staff were confused about their futures, unsure of whether they still had a job in the new administration.

'We needed to understand the institution,' said Pappas, 'because in opposition, a lot is hidden from you. In order to get a grasp of the extent of the problems, we needed to see everything. We also needed to ensure that we made full use of the powers given to councillors by the law. The ANC did not seem to understand – at least in this municipality – the legislative power of committees, of resolutions, of oversight, of reporting, etc. A lot of things were hidden from the opposition for obvious reasons, so we called them into the office.

'We told them, "We are here to work. We are not here to interrogate you about your political affiliation; we are not here to question how you got here; you guys are the senior management of this municipal- ity, you either work with us or you leave now. We're not here to fire you, but you've got to understand that there's a new vision and a new way of doing things."

'No one left, not from the senior management, and it was them who said, "Mayor, we fully understand, and we need our marching orders." 'The first meeting was to say you have a week, and we need you to compile a full status quo of your department. For example, we want to know how many staff you have, what are your problems, what is the capacity of the department to deliver, what is the budget, where are the deficits? We need any information that would help us to under-stand how the municipality is functioning or not functioning. We put it in their hands to give us the information. For the most part, they provided what we asked for.'

Mnikathi said, 'The general managers, now called directors, were happy; some of them really just wanted to get on with what they were originally employed to do. We asked each of them, "How can we assist you and capacitate your department so that you can achieve your targets more efficiently?" At that top level, they were willing to just get on with it. The problems started a level down.'

***

After a fraught couple of weeks, things began to settle down and Pappas was able to tell people, 'We have a new government, there's no disputing that. The election results are in, signed off, audited, finished, and all the other shenanigans are just political nonsense.'

As it turned out, there would be plenty more nonsense down the road.