BY NORM DIXON
The low level of participation by voters in the December 5 South African municipal elections reflects a growing dissatisfaction among workers and poor at the African National Congress (ANC) government's repeated failure to keep its promise of a "better life for all" in terms of access to essential services, housing, jobs and improved living standards. Municipal workers and local residents are fighting a bitter battle to prevent the privatisation of local government services.
Just 48% of South Africa's 18.4 million registered voters cast ballots. The numbers of abstainers among poor and working class Africans, as well as young people, was even greater. While a small number of African voters and a more significant proportion of coloured and Indian voters shifted their support to the right-wing Democratic Alliance (the DA combines the white "liberal" Democratic Party and apartheid's architects, the National Party), most poor and working class South Africans opted to stay home.
Of those who went to the polls, 59% supported the ANC and 23% supported the DA. In the 1999 national elections, the ANC was supported by 66% of voters while the components of the DA scored 17%.
The ANC won control of five of South Africa's six major cities: Johannesburg, Tshwane (Pretoria) and the East Rand in Gauteng, the Nelson Mandela metropole (Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage) in the Eastern Cape, and Durban. The DA won control of Cape Town, a city with more than three million inhabitants.
Voter turn-out in the suburbs of Durban in which predominantly working-class Indians live was less than 25%. Candidates supported by the Concerned Citizens Group (CCG), an organisation that has fought the Durban council's eviction of residents, won one seat on the council and performed well in other wards.
The CCG was one of several alliances that campaigned against the ANC's neo-liberal policies from the left. The best known, the Anti-Privatisation Forum led by Soweto's Trevor Ngwane who was expelled from the ANC for his opposition to the privatisation of local government services, failed to win a council seat.
ANC secretary-general Kgalema Motlanthe conceded that dissatisfaction, rather than apathy, contributed to the low voter turn-out and the ANC's lower support. "When people are unhappy with the party of their choice, that cannot be described as apathy", he told the December 7 Business Day.
More than 40,000 workers, members of the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) and the Independent Municipal Association of Trade Unions (IMATU) in Cape Town and Johannesburg, went on strike on November 30 and December 1 in protest at the city councils' privatisation plans. The plans, endorsed and promoted by the central ANC government, involve the corporatisation and commercialisation of local council services.
SAMWU is demanding that the ANC-controlled Johannesburg council and Cape Town's DA-dominated local government guarantee the jobs of workers transferred to privatised companies for 25 years and take back any of the companies that go bankrupt after privatisation. Johannesburg's ANC leaders are only willing to give a three-year job guarantee from the time of the introduction of its iGoli 2002 privatisation plan.
SAMWU and IMATU have given notice to the newly elected city councils and the ANC central government that municipal workers will hold a strike against privatisation.
The struggle over the ANC's privatisation agenda will be protracted. On December 5, Sydney Mufamadi, ANC minister for provincial affairs and local government (and a central committee member of the South African Communist Party), declared that the government was committed to stepping up "public-private sector partnerships" to deliver essential basic infrastructure like water, electricity and sanitation.