Will South Africa Be Okay?

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Jan-Jan Joubert. Will South Africa Be Okay?

Introduction

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Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

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JAN-JAN JOUBERT

WILL

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In Nelson Mandela Bay, the UDM – in contrast to elsewhere in the country – fell out with the DA, and then withdrew their support from the coalition. The opposition could well have remained in control if the then DA mayor, Athol Trollip, hadn’t flatly refused to co-operate with the EFF in that council. This was an unfortunate instance of personal political stupidity which cost the local DA dearly and delivered the hapless residents of Port Elizabeth into the hands of a coalition where the EFF (which the DA had excluded) now supports a dubious local UDM leader. This leader co-operates with the very ANC that over many years had brought the metro to the brink of collapse through corruption, wastage and common low-class thieving (summed up in the title of Chippy Olver’s in-depth study How to Steal a City: The Battle for Nelson Mandela Bay). The governing coalition had performed miracles in improving the situation, but within a year of the return of ANC-dominated municipal leadership the auditor-general’s report showed accurately and shockingly how the same mismanagement, corruption and self-enrichment had made a comeback. What a soul-destroying pity.

But because the coalitions didn’t make the voters aware of their successes, because the backlogs made it impossible to immediately duplicate the shining example of Cape Town, and because the various parties in the coalitions became seriously divided on all sorts of other policy matters, the coalition governments did not provide enough voters with a reason to stop supporting the ANC. In 2019 the ANC achieved better results in Tshwane, Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Bay than it had done in 2016, although in all three of those metros the party’s support is still below 50%.

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