Johannesburg – With a bible-sized political party election manifestos firmly ensconced under my smelly armpits, I write to you from the unbeautiful banks of the filthy Hennops river in Mhlahlandlela, the erstwhile home of Mzilikazi ka Mashobane.
You have known it as Verwoerdburg, Lytt Elton or Irene. They call it Centurion now. Sometimes in the mid-1990s, black people were allowed to live in Centurion.
I could only join them in 2008. But still, in the contemporary lingo of my Centurion neighbourhood WhatsApp group, people like me are described as “suspicious-looking BM (black male) – bearded, tallish, hefty and somewhat menacing”.
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Had my mother been living with me in Centurion today, she would be called “a cleaning girl” in the lingo of my WhatsApp group. In fact, I was recently reminded of my mother, when Chantelle, one of the 250 members of the Centurion neighbourhood WhatsApp group, a person I do not know from a bar of soap, posted an advert saying, “anybody requiring a girl to clean … please contact me”.
So I contacted her and gently suggested that no woman old enough to work should be called a girl. You have every right to ask me why I remain a member of the obnoxious Centurion WhatsApp group.
But I too should be able to ask you why at every opportunity since 1995, you have voted the same way, each time hoping to get different results, never failing to be disappointed; each time.
The current ward councillor for ward 70, where I live in the city of Tshwane, is Marika Elizabeth Kruger Muller. Below her smiling face on her LinkedIn front page, it is written that she has “good communication and management skills, strong admin and technical background”.
Apparently, she is also passionate about environmental issues. Muller has been ward 70 councillors since 2010. But actually, I have no clue who she is. I have never met her. I have never nominated or voted for her.
But I have to live with the fact her party has won both of the last two elections, after which she has been foisted upon all of us willy-nilly. On November 23 last year, I WhatsApped to Marika Muller, pictures of seven street lights in our street, which have been dysfunctional for all the years that she has been ward councillor.
I pleaded for her intervention. She ignored my message with undeserved contempt. To date, all seven street lights remain dysfunctional. And guess what? Marika Muller is standing again for the 2021 elections. Currently, the poles of the dysfunctional street lights are being put to “good” use.
Posters bearing the grinning heads of the DA’s John Steenhuisen and Randal Williams are hanging shamelessly on the seven street poles of shame. Could this be the real purpose of these poles? Like the dysfunctional poles of shame in my street, the IEC website could shed no light on who exactly the councillor candidates for ward 70 are.
Nor were the political parties enthusiastically volunteering the names of their candidates. Everywhere one goes, one finds posters with the big-headed images of national party leaders and not the pictures of local ward councillor candidates.
We are supposed to be having municipal elections in four weeks, yet the identities, let alone CVs of local candidates are best-kept secrets. With the assistance of a journalist for the local Centurion newspaper, we phoned a few political party whips, asking who their candidates for Centurion ward 70 were. We called a few candidates ward councillors themselves.
As the party leaders, the candidates sounded perplexed and a tad flustered when we asked for their brief bios. In the process, we discovered that the ANC candidate for ward 70 is one Khazamula Chabalala. He was too busy in a meeting to send us his bio.
The EFF candidate for the same ward is Thania Netlonkoene, an anti-GBV activist, who has served as PR councillor since 2016. Last time around, the DA got a whopping 87%, the ANC received 7% and the VF Plus got 3.3% support. Over the last five years, our dysfunctional street lights have been a metaphor for the chaos, the neglect and the greed that reigned in Tshwane.
Failed coalitions, an opportunistic placing of the metro under administration, councillors going AWOL and three mayors later, we have been through five years of shame. And yet this formerly whites-only ward has the DA written all over it.
As long as her party bosses are pleased with her, Muller has a permanent job. How nice. In the meantime, I and Muller remain seven poles apart.
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