DA mal

Municipal Systems Act applying to municipal managers

2006-04-11T15:27:00.000+02:00

What follows are the legal outlines for Wallace Mgoqi's employment. The exact details of his contract are private between him and his employer.

The Act quoted below states the task of the municipal manager is leader of the city's civil service, and the manager should not be unreasonably pushed around by elected political office bearers. Well and good - so long as the manager in this case behaves like a member of the civil service.

Mgoqi's non-cooperation with the multi-party government makes city government difficult. His behaviour amounts to breach of any reasonably-construed performance agreement (but then again, the ANC was in charge of defining that for Mgoqi).

In this way, he is abusing his office twice: he claims the benefits of the Act in protecting his job, and so makes us ratepayers pay for destroying the government's effectiveness; and he also forces us to pay his salary while he turns the civil service into a political grandstand, which is against the spirit of the Act.

From the Municipal Systems Act:

Inconsistency with applicable labour legislation

52. In the event of any inconsistency between a provision of this Chapter, including the Code of Conduct referred to in section 69, or a regulation made for the purposes of this Chapter, and any applicable labour legislation, the labour legislation prevails.

Part 2: Political strictures, political office bearers and roles

Roles and responsibilities

53. ( 1 ) A municipality must, within the framework of and in accordance with relevant provisions of the Municipal Structures Act, this Act and other applicable legislation, define the specific role and area of responsibility of each political structure and political office bearer of the municipality and of the municipal manager.

(2) The respective roles and areas of responsibility ot’ each political structure and political office bearer and of the municipal manager must-

(a) be defined in precise terms by way of separate terms of reference, in writing, for each political structure or political office bearer and the municipal manager; and

(b) be acknowledged and given effect to in the rules, procedures, instructions, policy statements and other written instruments of the municipality.

(3) instruments defining, acknowledging or giving effect to the roles and areas of responsibility of these political structures and political office bearers and the municipal manager must be appropriate to the category and type in which the municipality falls.

(4) Terms of reference mentioned in subsection (2)(a) may include the delegation of powers and duties to the relevant political structure or political office bearer or the municipal manager in terms of section 59.

(5) When defining the respective roles and areas of responsibility of each political structure and political office bearer and of the municipal manager, the municipality must determine—

(a) the relationships among those political structures and political office bearers and the municipal manager, and the manner in which they must interact;

(b) appropriate lines of accountability and reporting for those political structures and political office bearers and the municipal manager;

(c) mechanisms, processes and procedures for minimising cross-referrals and unnecessary overlapping of responsibilities between those political structures and political office bearers and the municipal manager;

(d) mechanisms, processes and procedures for resolving disputes between those political structures and political office bearers and the municipal manager; and

(e) mechanisms, processes and procedures for interaction, between—

(i) those political structures and political otlice bearers and the municipal manager and other staff members of the municipality; and

(ii) councillors and the municipal manager and other staff members of the municipality.

(6) If a municipality has a decentralised regional administration in any part of Its area, the municipality must determine mechanisms, processes and procedures for interaction between the regional management of the municipality and—

(a) the ward councillor or other councillor responsible for that part of the municipality’s area:

(b) any subcouncil or ward committee, where applicable, in that part of the municipality’s area; and

(c) the local community in that part of the municipality’s area.

Code of Conduct for councillors

54. The Code of Conduct contained in Schedule 1 applies to every member of a municipal council.

Municipal managers

55. (1) As head of administration the municipal manager of a municipality is, subject to the policy directions of the municipal council, responsible and accountable for—

(a) the formation and development of an economical, effective, efficient and accountable administration—

(i) equipped to carry out the task of implementing the municipality’s integrated development plan in accordance with Chapter 5;

(ii) operating in accordance with the municipality’s performance management system in accordance with Chapter 6; and

(iii) responsive to the needs of the local community to participate in the affairs of the municipality;

(b) the management of the municipality’s administration in accordance with this Act and other legislation applicable to the municipality;

(c) the implementation of the municipality’s integrated development plan, and the monitoring of progress with implementation of the plan;

(d) the management of the provision of services to the local community in a sustainable and equitable manner;

(e) the appointment of staff other than those referred to in section 56(a), subject to the Employment Equity Act, 1998 (Act No. 55 of 1998);

(f) the management, effective utilisation and training of staff;;

(g) the maintenance of discipline of staff;

(h) the promotion of sound labour relations and compliance by the municipality with applicable labour legislation;

(i) advising the political structures and political office bearers of the municipality;

(j) managing communications between the municipality’s administration and its political structures and political office bearers;

(k) carrying out the decisions of the political structures and political office bearers of the municipality;

(l) the administration and implementation of the municipality’s by-laws and other legislation;

(m) the exercise of any powers and the performance of any duties delegated by the municipal council, or sub-delegated by other delegating authorities of the municipality, to the municipal manager in terms of section 59:

(n) facilitating participation by the local community in the affairs of the municipality;

(o) developing and maintaining a system whereby community satisfaction with municipal services is assessed;

(p) the implementation of national and provincial legislation applicable to the municipality; and

(q) the performance of any other function that may be assigned by the municipal council.

(2) As accounting officer of the municipality the municipal manager is responsible and accountable for—

(a) all income and expenditure of the municipality;

(b) all assets and the discharge of all liabilities of the municipality; and

(c) proper and diligent compliance with applicable municipal finance management legislation.

Appointment of managers directly accountable to municipal managers

56. (a) A municipal council, after consultation with the municipal manager, appoints a manager directly accountable to the municipal manager.

(b) A person appointed as a manager in terms of paragraph (a) must have the relevant skills and expertise to perform the duties associated with the post in question, taking into account the protection or advancement of persons or categories of persons disadvantaged by unfair discrimination.

Employment contracts for municipal managers and managers directly accountable to municipal managers

57. (1) A person to be appointed as the municipal manager of a municipality, and a
person to be appointed as a manager directly accountable to the municipal manager, may
be appointed to that position only—

(a) in terms of a written employment contract with the municipality complying with the provisions of this section; and

(b) subject to a separate performance agreement concluded annually as provided for in subsection (2).

(2) The performance agreement referred to in subsection (1)(b) must—

(a) be concluded within a reasonable time after a person has been appointed as the municipal manager or as a manager directly accountable to the municipal manager, and thereafter, within one month after the beginning of the financial year of the municipality;

(b) in the case of the municipal manager, be entered into with the municipality as represented by the mayor or executive mayor, as the case may be; and

(c) in the case of a manager directly accountable to the municipal manager, be entered into with the municipal manager.

(3) The employment contract referred to in subsection ( l)(a) must include, subject to applicable labour legislation, details of duties, remuneration, benefits and other terms and conditions of employment,

(4) The performance agreement referred to in subsection (l)(b) must include—

(a) performance objectives and targets that must be met, and the time frames within which those performance objectives and targets must be met;

(b) standards and procedures for evaluating performance and intervals for evaluation; and

(c) the consequences of substandard performance.

(5) The performance objectives and targets referred to in subsection (4)(a) must be practical, measurable and based on the key performance indicators set out from time to time in the municipality’s integrated development plan.

(6) The employment contract for a municipal manager must—

(a) be for a fixed term of employment not exceeding a period ending two years after the election of the next council of the municipality;

(b) include a provision for cancellation of the contract, in the case of non-compliance with the employment contract or, where applicable, the performance agreement;

(c) stipulate the terms of the renewal of the employment contract, but only by agreement between the parties; and

(d) reflect the values and principles referred to in section 50, the Code of Conduct set out in Schedule 2, and the management standards and practices contained in section 51.

(7) A municipality may extend the application of subsection (6) to any manager directly accountable to the municipal manager.

Remuneration of municipal managers and managers directly accountable to municipal managers

58. A municipality must, on or before 31 October of each year, publish in the media the salary scales and benefits applicable to posts of the municipal manager and every manager that is directly accountable to the municipal manager.

Response to Cassandra

2006-03-08T07:25:00.000+02:00

The critics this week are all very negative. But most suggestions made are meant constructively and some ideas are worth close scrutiny.

The DA can't form a majority government on its own in Cape Town. We polled over 40% of the votes in Cape Town, and the ANC nearly 40%. The next city government is balanced on a knife's edge.

I believe this week's Cassandra complex misses the mark. In its own right, 40% of the vote in Cape Town is hardly insignificant. This 40% is the DA's core constituency: 40% of the voters of Cape Town vote DA when they are asked. We've known the extent of our core constituency since about 1998 or 1999. Before that, many of those people voted National Party in the past and, in fact, nearly all previous National Party supporters now vote DA. This should surprise nobody, and can be instantly verified by cross-checking with the results of previous elections in which the Nats participated.

The support for the DA in other cities is quite as resilient, and similarly shouldn't be trivialised. In Johannesburg our share of the vote is slightly eroded, but in Pretoria it is slightly increased. The DA's not going to disappear, it is not in decline, and we have no reason to think that the writing is on the wall.

So why is everybody worrying about Cape Town? Because the DA vote went from 53% last election to 41% in this? Laurence Caromba says: 'The problem is that as fast as the ANC is losing support, the DA is losing it faster.' Let's now look at that.

Some observers look at a 'decline' of support for the DA from the 53% in 2000 that created a government (later demolished by floor-crossing) to 41% in 2006 and describe it as an absolute decline in DA support. This is ludicrous. We know where those 'missing votes' are - in the back pocket of the Independent Democrats. Do the maths. If you add the ID's vote to the DA's you are back where you started in 2000 - or, indeed, 1994. The ANC has made no gains, and the DA's message of 'don't split the opposition vote' is precisely on target.

I don't for a minute want to describe the ID's support as somehow illegitimate. On the contrary, we in the DA should be asking ourselves hard questions about how it came about that this new party can take a fifth of the vote away from us. We just know that these voters will be disappointed at the next floor-crossing. It will give the ANC a lot of trouble to poach the minimum nine DA councillors in order to erode our elected numbers. But the ANC will find it relatively easy to steal a minimum of three ID councillors. Splitting the opposition vote has never been more dangerous or costly. Maybe we didn't make that clear enough to the voters of Cape Town.

This 10% of voters who lent their support to the ID in this election are not to be dismissed lightly. We know, roughly, who they are. Most of them live in Mitchell's Plain, and some of them live in Atlantis, Kensington, Grassy Park, Lotus River and Ottery. In those suburbs, the vote split three ways. In all of them except Mitchell's Plain the ANC benefitted from the split.

What's psephologically interesting about these voters is that they voted for the Nats in the 1996 and 1999 elections, for the DA in 2000 and for the ID in 2005 and 2006. These are, unexpectedly in South Africa, undecided voters. South Africans believe that voter support for parties is very fixed, and so it is; but here is the great exception.

Electorally, here is a place where the DA must be critical of itself. We have, perhaps, grown excessively used to the idea of a core constituency; and though we work hard during elections to mobilise these people, we do not devote sufficient time and resources to persuading the undecided voters of Cape Town to elect our candidates. We can and will work on changing that. What we know is that this 10% of Cape Town voters have, in the past, voted for the DA, and now vote for the ID. They did not vote for the ANC, and never have. These voters are not the ANC's to gain, they are the DA's to lose.

From a core constituency a party can draw supporters, funds, a definite base of votes and, most importantly, a sense of legitimacy and permanence. In this country, only the ANC, the DA, the IFP and, in a special sense, the ACDP have this kind of legitimacy and permanence. All other parties depend on the degree to which the three biggest parties have tiny undecided margins. The PAC, Azapo and the UDM feed on voters on the periphery of the ANC. The VF+ is absorbs marginal DA voters. The only place in the country where undecided voters are a fairly large block is Cape Town, which explains why some marginal parties like the ID tend to do well here. But the ID requires to do well solely among undecided voters: their support base is volatile and transient by its nature. I will be surprised if ID support stabilises, and will feel vindicated if it evaporates, UDM-style, at the next election.

Whether or not we pursue and persuade this group of 10% undecided voters, the DA simply can't forget the 40% of Cape Town voters who already vote for us. The 40% have always supported the DA, and they really, really matter. At base, it is these people who we must represent most fiercely. We will disappoint them if we spend all our time chasing after new votes at their expense.

Brendan Boyle in the Sunday Times has this about the ANC:

'As the provincial leadership of the ANC hunkered down yesterday to plan its recovery from the electoral disaster wrought by months of bitter party in-fighting, a source said its strategy for the next five years would be "to break the back of the DA in this province".'

Very well then. The DA doesn't wish any harm to come to the ANC or its supporters. Our nation is a liberal democracy, in which people may champion causes that one does not like and with which one does not agree. We in the DA contest the ANC's ideas, policies and government, but we don't oppose their democratic rights.

When the ANC speaks of breaking the back of the DA in the Western Cape, they suggest not only that the ANC does not accept the legitimacy of the opposition party, but they question also the legitimacy of opposition voters. They are actually attacking our core constituency.

And when, in consequence of attacks of this kind, the DA seems pugnacious and inclined not to cooperate with the ANC, we essentially have the interests of our constituents at heart. Ah, but 'the DA simply doesn't seem patriotic enough,' says Laurence. But we are patriotic, in the same sense that our constituents are patriotic. When they and we are attacked by the government of the day we defend the rights to which we are all are entitled, because we are citizens of South Africa. South Africa is not monolithic like the ANC; we are a people of many parts and traditions, and there must be room for all of us. Our definition of patriotism requires a synthesis of these traditions, and we believe that if the back of our liberal tradition is broken, then South Africa will be a much poorer place.

Laurence also says that 'for the good of the both the party and the country, [the current DA leadership] should take the opportunity to usher in a new generation of leaders, and then step aside.' In due course this will happen; and as you rightly say, it will happen for the good of the party and the country. It will not happen now. We elect our leaders in a constitutional manner at the Federal Congress of the DA after sober reflection on the interests of our constituency and our nation.

He continues with 'the DA's biggest mistake was getting too caught up in their own anger towards the government.' We are caught up in a much more general public anger towards the government, Laurence. Forgive me if I mistake you, but I gather you also are angry with the government in many ways. You voted for the DA. Should we not represent your interests? How would it serve better to misrepresent you? What anger should we discard? Should we welcome the Firearms Control Act? Should we practice Aids drugs appeasement? Should we peacefully accept tender corruption as a fact of patriotic South African life? Angry we may be, but we are not unguidedly angry, because there are good reasons to be angry.

And we are not blindly rude to the ANC. The ANC government has done some things well. We may well govern some municipalities with them, perhaps Cape Town itself, but this will not hinder the DA's usual mode of constructive criticism.

Farrel Lifson says that the DA 'desperately need a prominent municipality (like Cape Town) to prove to voters that they are capable of governing effectively and can do a better job than the ANC.' I also think the DA will be more credible when we show we can govern. The point is largely political, though - we can and will represent the interests of our constituency whether or not the DA is in government.

zaBlogger says: 'If current opposition parties can't take a large bite out of ANC support in this environment then frankly they should quietly wander off into the sunset a let a new set of opposition parties/leaders come to the fore.' Must the DA's existence be judged by our ability to destroy or undermine the ANC? We don't accept that. The ANC has its own business to attend to, and we will ever be the faithful watchdog. Our own success will be measured by our loyalty to our constituency.

I'm not sure if a true rebuff was needed to the depressed and anxious articles on the future of the DA. The sense is that the writers all have an interest and enthusiasm for oppositional politics; they fear to be let down by the DA; they fear we will not fulfil the mandate given to us. If I write a rebuff it suggests that I somehow believed their pessimism was fundamentally wrong. It is not wrong to be pessimistic; but pessimism is misplaced. Oppositional politics isn't going away in South Africa, not while the DA can help it. The oppositional mode is needed just as much as ever because the ANC seems to see a chance finally to flatten it altogether.

Do not see the ANC's arrogance as a cause for despair, because it is an opportunity for all South Africans. In the DA we have mobilised potent support against the ANC, as we demonstrated in the local election. Having done that, and so refreshed our mandate, we again will attempt to teach the leaders of the ANC the lesson they must learn: that democracy is a resolution of the many parts of Man.

I got a job

2004-12-20T09:50:00.000+02:00

Right guys - I'm employed from the New Year. I can stop wittering about my personal future now and start thinking about the state of the nation.

Delport's reaction to gay marriage ruling

2004-12-01T08:01:00.000+02:00

It looks as though the DA's going to class gay marriage as one of those free vote issues. Tertius Delport says he's surprised by the ruling.

Hm.

A debate in the DA about gay marriage is of no material importance towards the process towards legalising marriage for everybody. So I think I'm grudgingly prepared to accept that the DA has a few homophobic members so long as their opinions a) don't have any effect on the rights of gay people and b) don't publicly damage the tolerant reputation of the party. Practical reasons towards internal unity only. But the moment a bigot raises his or her head above the public parapet, you can count on me to take aim. You already know my opinion of Tertius Delport's ability to involve the party in scandal.

The consequences of a breakdown in the tripartite alliance

2004-11-30T13:41:00.000+02:00

Political trade unions are common the world around, particularly in countries where the workers speak English: Britain, America, Australia (at least historically, and even then not socialist), Zimbabwe. Among non-English nations: Germany and Poland. COSATU is not shy of political involvement, and might very well pursue the mode of socialist labour party. Our labour movement is not only already politicised, but there are many good international templates they might choose to copy if they abandon the tripartite alliance. And COSATU, or a Workers' Party front uniting them with non-COSATU unions, would surely contest elections after a split.

It's most troubling to imagine the state of the nation after a split. It's not like the deceptively simple breakdown of the DA when the Nats left. The government itself would be destabilised, even if it didn't fall. A conflict between urban and rural people would emerge if COSATU is as electorally strong as they hope. Even if the ANC holds on to the government, the position and credibility of the president and his government would be weakened because he could and would be accused of destroying the power base of the governing party. If the ANC is forced to protect its black African constituency, it might elaborate in unforeseeable ways on an African nationalist project.

This isn't only party-political stuff, people. COSATU leaders must know that a split might well precipitate a South African constitutional crisis. The country's political systems are not well-adjusted to a real contest for power. To begin with, the floor-crossing rules would face a more serious challenge of legitimacy. The extensive pattern of ANC 'cadre deployments' throughout the administration may cause a breakdown in the civil service, pitting ANC ideologists against the COSATU shop-stewards who were their erstwhile colleagues.

But this is the worst that could happen. South Africa would not break down. Civil society can function in South Africa even with unstable democratic government. South Africa actually needs a peaceful constitutional crisis of this kind so as to develop political systems necessary to make democracy permanent.

Highly toxic

2004-11-29T13:03:00.000+02:00

Until last week, I'd say the fight between COSATU and the ANC was engineered by COSATU using the well-established second-rank mechanism. The second-rank mechanism is a variety of kite-flying employing spokespeople of an organisation, whose statements can later be 'clarified'. The man who started the fight about Zimbabwe, who issued calls for a blockade at Beit Bridge, and who poked Smuts Ngonyama in the eye about the Telkom deal, is Patrick Craven and he, as COSATU spokesperson, can't be considered anything more than a mouthpiece.

Only on Friday last week Zwelinzima Vavi got involved personally. Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma haven't yet replied in kind; they've just turned Ngonyama and Malusi Gigaba loose.

As usual, all this adds up to another spate of jockeying between the first- and second-strongest partners in the tripartite alliance. People are again talking of a split. But what does it take for COSATU to split from the ANC?

Motive. COSATU is going to need a reason to split from the ANC. Not the touted reasons involving tactics in Zimbabwe or Telkom. Rather: when will COSATU get its chance to form a government on its own terms?
Opportunity. Political decisions are taken when the omens are good, and at no other time. Observers of the fighting must realise that, to the extent that COSATU wants to break from the alliance, they would prefer the ANC to throw them out. They don't want to secede; voters don't like a loser.
A fast getaway. COSATU will need electoral support after the split. They will need exact metrics of how many voters will back them out of the alliance. The moment it looks like they can form a government without the ANC is the moment they'll split. They will also need to split shortly before an election or, if not then, to be sure they can bring down the government and force them to renegotiate power sharing. (An additional requirement is that they must be sure they won't be frozen out if the rump ANC decides to turn to alternative sources of support, such as the DA.)

The ANC must feel very sure that none of the following conditions will emerge any time soon, if can taunt Zwelinzima Vavi by calling him a 'young child'.

What of the role of the non-COSATU unions in all this? Some of those unions, particularly Solidarity, have interests in what's going on at Telkom, and they might be very keen on messages coming out of COSATU about this subject. And I'm guessing that COSATU may have more to say to the non-affiliated unions after a split from the tripartite alliance. Might the emergence of a truly multi-racial labour party be possible after all?

Kent Morkel knew his father

2004-11-19T13:22:00.000+02:00

The southern Cape is a funny place for the Democratic Alliance. The split between the liberals and the rump Nats in the Cape Town metropolitan DA is well-known, and I've written about it before.

Many have commented that the DA is essentially an urban party. Some believe that the Western Cape and Northern Cape vary this because of a strong country vote, particularly from coloured agricultural labourers. Whatever the truth, the pattern of the DA's electoral support in the Western Cape particularly profoundly shapes how the party operates internally.

The towns of Knysna, Hermanus and Wilderness are liberal ex-DP havens. Several of the other towns, like George, Oudsthoorn and Calvinia owe their political tradition in the DA to the NNP. And the voting pattern amongst the coloured citizens of the Western Cape hinterland differs from the pattern in Cape Town: the DA finds less traction amongst poor coloured voters in the rural Western Cape, contrasted with strong support amongst poor coloured voters in Cape Town (or at least until the ID stuck its oar in).

The southern Cape's political strength is very much buttressed because the party's Provincial Leader is the mayor of George. He commands loyal support from the ex-NNP south coast, from the conservative west coast and grudgingly from the ex-DP south coast also.

Theuns Botha's position in the party is, therefore, strong. But it is not certain. Added together, his rural support doesn't outweigh the voting strength of the (divided) Cape Town metropolis.

The reason for this is because of the credible claim that the DA is fundamentally an urban party presently - even in the Western Cape. Cape Town provides more than 50% of the votes obtained for the party in the Western Cape, overshadowing the performance of the rest of the province combined. It is always more difficult to create large political organisations in country areas, so the metropolitan DA has a natural advantage, which it could use to dominate the provincial party if so it chose.

But instead, the Western Cape DA attempted to overbalance the provincial constitution's democratic mandate in favour of the rural areas. During the 2004 candidate selection process, the Cape Town DA conceded that the rural party would fill 60% of the seats in the electoral college and the city would fill the remaining 40%. Why? It was claimed that an effort be made to prevent disaffection and walkovers. This effort, if the rationale is accepted at face value, seems to have worked fairly well: the DA in the Western Cape suffered few defections in councils since the general election. In fact, the DA gained the West Coast District Municipality: I doubt this would have been possible without placating the west coast DA. (The electoral college deal was overturned by the DA's Federal Legal Commission, but the result of the electoral college stands because the FLC's decision was not retroactive. Special case, special pleading. But it worked.)

Even this left Theuns Botha a few votes short of a mandate to write his list of candidates for the general and provincial election. So he picked up those votes in the city with a little help from the Morkels. This was an interesting choice of ally, because the Morkels are very far from being exemplary representatives of the ex-NNP faction in the city. They play a different game: populism and patronage.

Since the election, since the cross-over period, certainly since the Provincial Congress, the alliance between the Botha faction and the Morkels appears to have died. Kent is supposed to have called in the favour of his electoral college support by being voted DA chairperson. But this is a small play. The urban claim on the province's party structures has grown constitutionally and is restored to its 50% representation in party structures. The urban voice is not that of the Morkels or the ex-NNP faction but that of Helen Zille speaking her clarion voice in Parliament. The country vote, led by Theuns Botha, is scarcely heard.

And now Kent Morkel has admitted to taking about R10000 from the micro-finance company Gilt Edged Management Services (GEMS). This, he says, was for organising a meeting between them and the South African Municipal Workers' Union representing workers in George. The purpose of the meeting was to get some SAMWU applications to GEMS processed administratively by the municipality. Because he wasn't a councillor in that municipality, he believed he was entitled to claim a fee for that work.

Kent was intelligently interrogated by John Maytham a few days ago on Cape Talk. Did he have a contract from GEMS for arranging the meeting? No. Did he pay tax on his earnings? No direct answer. Kent claimed that he had a receipt for the money, and this had to prove that his intent was honest because people don't sign receipts for bribes. What is the truth? The truth is that Kent's career is at the mercy of DA members who must ask whether or not the Morkel reputation is permanently damaged. The truth is that party machinists and brokers have one less faction to manage.

Kent's political fate will be an interesting barometer of the fortunes of the Western Cape DA factions. Kent Morkel seems already to have spent his political capital; his brother Craig's career languishes for so long as the Travelgate scandal is unresolved; their father Gerald is loved by a few, but hated by far too many; the ex-NNP faction is silent; and the Western Cape DA speaks loudest in the voice of Helen Zille.

Intermission

2004-11-19T13:18:00.000+02:00

Dear readers: I'm busy trying to find a new job. I won't bore you with the details. This is taking a lot of time in my day, and for reasons of priority DA mal is playing second fiddle.

Profound apologies. I will make post about Kent Morkel now by special request, but will resume regular posting, perhaps with an elaboration on my job situation, after I'm fully employed once again.

ANC leaders want to buy Telkom

2004-11-09T13:25:00.000+02:00

'Is this good?' asks Hellkom (which doesn't support permalinks). No, it is not good! It's terrible. It's a caricature of the ANC's theories about 'empowerment'.

Look, the thing is this: you don't have to prove corruption; conflicts of interest need not be corrupt in order to be totally irregular and out of order. Smuts Ngonyama and Andile Ncaba should have nothing to do with buying any bits of Telkom, especially when the bits they plan to buy have been bought for them by Telkom itself in its notorious self-funded buy-back scheme. This thing just reeks. Ngonyama and Ncaba may not be corrupt, but how can we possibly trust them?

Delport, Fischer and the honorary doctorate

2004-11-09T10:19:00.000+02:00

Tertius Delport has involved the Democratic Alliance, despite his protests that he speaks only for some rather dodgy caucus in Stellenbosch University and not for the party, in an ugly, unnecessary and wholly ideological dispute about whether to award Bram Fischer a posthumous honorary doctorate. It is rather too much to suggest that Delport is deliberately trying to engineer a party-political platform on the issue. If I know anything about him, I know this: that he is unsophisticated in his over-educated way; that he neither recognises the subtle issue of dividing his responsibilities between the university and the party, nor does he understand that the Stellenbosch radicals may have deliberately set a trap for him and his unreconstructed opinions.

All he had to do was shut up and let Herman Giliomee, who is more lucid anyway, take up the issue and defuse it. Instead, his decision to speak left the party out on a limb, and this has been enthusiastically exploited by our opponents. I hear no comment about the issue that doesn't describe Delport as the DA's justice spokesperson and, since this reaction is wholly predictable, Delport is therefore wholly culpable.

He personally stands to lose everything from his public intervention in the matter; and I hope that he does. At a strictly practical level, his naivety allows us to question his capacity to speak for the party. And since he didn't consult the party about his intervention in the matter, so it is perfectly legitimate to discuss whether he has brought the party into disrepute.

Delport's grounds for his opposition to the award is that he doesn't think communists should be honoured in such a way.

Now Fischer may have been, as he claims, a Stalinist who advocated violent revolution. But, as I have said elsewhere, issues such as these are questions of modern politics, not of original intent or historical curiosity. Delport's words imply that he has a problem with the involvement of the Communist Party in the modern dispensation. There is no other way of reading it. Delport is undermining the legitimacy of the modern, governing, constitutional SACP.

Allow me to stand this on its head. The DA would be within its rights to protest without reservation if anyone doubted our own constitutional participation in modern politics in an equivalent way. If Blade Nzimande were to say - unlikely, I admit - 'I won't permit Molly Blackburn a posthumous honorary doctrate from the University of Fort Hare on the grounds that she represented a party in the apartheid parliament' that would strike fundamentally at the modern legitimacy of the Democratic Alliance. So, conversely, when Delport attempts to deny Fischer an honorary doctrate only on the stated grounds that he was a communist activist, he equivalently undermines the legitimacy of the modern SACP.

Stellenbosch University, I suspect, feels exactly the same way. Delport has effectively undermined the university by associating his political disputes with their otherwise outstanding academic reputation.

I hope everyone who reads this can appreciate the issue of the honorary doctrate itself differs from the fact that Tertius Delport chose to speak about it. The award may have merit, or it may not - that's entirely besides the point. It is that Delport decided to immure himself in it that polarised the debate so much.

Voter registration at the West Coast Village

2004-11-08T14:33:00.000+02:00

On Saturday, when we ran our table at the West Coast Village, we got thirty-two names, addresses and phone numbers from people who are not registered. So at this rate we need to run another 190 tables and we'll have the newly-demarcated ward in the bag 8-)

The event we did was experimental; nobody in Table View has ever organised a get-registered event before and we needed to see what turnout we'd get. We can rely on a name added to the list every five minutes on an early-month rugby Saturday at the West Coast Village. We have to get that rate up. I calculate we can only expect another four to six registration tables at any given shopping centre, and if we hope to get 6000 new voters registered by the next election, that means we'd have to get at least a thousand registered each time. This is clearly not going to happen.

What did we do? We were allowed to put two small neat tables and a computer in front of Pick 'n Pay facing the central quad in the West Coast Village. It was a good traffic area, because most people were either visiting Woolworths or Pick 'n Pay in their visit. It didn't take any effort to ask people if they were registered. People who weren't interested said as much, and people who stopped to talk didn't seem at all resentful. The most discouraging thing was the evident disinterest in politics; many people muttered that registering and voting didn't matter. Few people who said this stopped to debate the issue. Those who stopped to talk were frequently politically aware already, and were already registered to vote.

What is apparent also is that the ANC government of the city doesn't form much of a talking point for most people who aren't politically aware. Some reactions to the ANC are, as I always anticipate, viscerally racist and disparaging - but one can at least say that people who think this way are, in a sense, exercising their political will. No, the majority of middle-class people do not allow politics to form part of their experience at all.

So the lesson I take from this is that apathy is something we need to beat first. In order to make our registration campaigns more effective, we must first tackle people's lack of interest.

We agreed around the table that we need a publicity campaign that works simultaneously withe registration campaign. There are a number of messages I hope to develop that will speak to the minds of Table View voters.

I wrote a letter to a business tenant of the West Coast Village who showed loyalty to the Democratic Alliance and helped us a lot in organising the event last weekend. I said

'One important aim of our party is to get vigorous and independently-minded local public representatives elected, who can speak their minds on behalf of the community amongst whom they live. The residents of greater Table View need answers to real local problems, which include pollution, traffic congestion and crime. We know that crime in particular hampers the development of local business.

'We in the DA definitely believe that the future representatives of Table View, Parklands, Sunningdale and Blouberg must be drawn from the people who live in these communities. Who, after all, knows better how to tackle the issues of the area than someone who lives in the community? And we will always oppose the ANC's "deployments" of outsiders whose only loyalties are party loyalties.' -- My letter to tenant of West Coast Village

This letter expresses some of the more conventional messages the DA has used to mobilise support in its core constituency. I'm worried that this range of messages is insufficient to drive a popular mandate for the DA. This isn't the same thing as saying that I doubt that we would get a popular mandate in Table View - I'm certain that the DA is the party of choice for more than 60% of the suburbs of greater Table View. But there is a wide gap between people's tendencies and their votes. We need to make sure that everyone who might express a tendency towards supporting the DA will get out, register and vote.

West Coast Village registration drive tomorrow

2004-11-05T08:44:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow from 9am I'll be convincing people to register to vote at the West Coast Village shopping centre. We'll run the table until about 3:30pm, because nobody will be around after the rugby match begins.

This is the second phase of my experiments to find the best means of registering the hopelessly under-registered Parklands area.

The property managers insist on our drive being non-political, which is entirely understandable and acceptable. We'll be collecting telephone numbers for a registration campaign only. This means we cannot re-use the telephone numbers for DA campaigning. This is a pity, but we have every reason to maintain our integrity on this. The property managers know that we're members of the DA, so it is a leap of faith for them to allow us to run the registration table at all. Practically speaking, it can only help our relations with them if we stick closely to the non-political deal.

Harksen redux

2004-11-04T13:08:00.000+02:00

Oh good grief. Well, I suppose if he's extradited to South Africa after his term then we'll just have to live with the inevitable rehash of Gerald Morkel's idiocy. Somehow I don't see the German justice system cooperating though.

Confessions of an election junkie

2004-11-04T07:31:00.000+02:00

My policy is not to discuss here what isn't primarily the business of this blog: pursuit of the aims and policies of the Democratic Alliance in Cape Town and in South Africa at large. So - no posts on the subject of the American presidential election. This post starts at that point because I wanted to enlarge on a subject that struck me as I followed the enthusiastic reportage of the American election.

It's this: all ye who enter here, abandon logic. I tried to remain restrained and disinterested, and found that the consequence of this led me early to the certain conclusion that Bush would win a second term.

Politically I think this is very troubling; but mostly troubling for America herself and for countries in the Middle East and a few scattered others such as Venezuela and North Korea. There may be political consequences for South Africa from a militarist USA, but they will probably be mixed consequences. For example, SA's economic fortunes will probably improve on the back of American economic decline - up to a point. It would be terrible for everybody if the USA's economy finally imploded; but their lesser misfortunes may provide the rest of the civilised world with opportunities to replace American outsourced jobs, and to provide ample resources to hedge against the declining dollar.

So Bush's victory, dispassionately viewed, can be something of a good thing for South Africa and other nations.

But of course, in the end, I caved. I wanted Kerry to win; I got caught up in the fever; I started reading Kos; I wrote a letter for the Guardian's Clark County Ohio campaign. Anyone who's fought in an election will know the feeling that I felt, that I always feel in our own South African elections: the fun and adrenaline and the sense that a tidal wave sweeps you up and carries you into victory, that nothin's gonna stop us now.

But the voters stopped the Kerry campaign in the end, just like the voters stopped DA hopes of a more decisive opposition mandate in 2004. The taste of defeat is more acidulous because of the emotional tide that made one fight in the first place. One becomes a victim, and accuses the other side of dirty tricks.

The experience of victory, though, is worth the risk of losing. The DA victory in the Cape Town council in 2000 vindicated the fever, and the desire to relish the pain of the losers is not only hard to resist, but it also amplifies one's own pleasure.

Such, I imagine, are the sensations of the Kerry and Bush campaigns. If anything, the aftermath polarises the parties yet more than the campaign does.

I could be pious and hope that the American parties and people will now reconcile and 'move forward'. But elections don't work that way, and this is as it ever is. Elections are emotionally transformative: cathartic for the winners, and inspiring of introspection and melancholy in the losers. From these transformations are built the next contest; fought over the same ground and invested with the same emotions, but with new issues and new faces.

Provincial Congress at Stillbaai

2004-11-01T14:12:00.000+02:00

Contrary to my promises, I did not go to the Congress. I am a very bad Democratic Alliance member.

But I have news nevertheless. On the issue of party organisation, some of you may have read the Mail&Guardian last Friday on the subject of a deal between Theuns Botha and the Morkel clan (subscription required). The M&G suggested this was a fix-up. Here are the results of the election for office-bearers, and I let you judge for yourselves:

Leader: Theuns Botha (East region)
Chairperson: Kent Morkel (Metro region)
Vice-Chairperson for Metro region: Leon van Rensburg
Vice-Chairperson for West region: Ernest Maroem
Vice-Chairperson for East region: Marius Swart
Chair of Finance: Kobus Marais (East region)
Metro Regional Chair: Helen Zille
Western Regional Chair: Kraai van Niekerk
Eastern Regional Chair: Michael de Villiers

Of the urban liberal section, the only name here is Helen Zille, whose base is now in the national Parliament. Marius and Kraai are also MPs. The others are either councillors or MPLs. All but Helen are men. Importantly, I'd estimate that all of them except Helen are operators, or political machinists, and not charismatic public-face politicians.

The M&G speculates that Kent Morkel was given the post of Provincial Chairperson because he would then have a good base from which to launch a crack at becoming Cape Town's DA mayoral candidate at the next municipal election. So far as I can see, little stands in his way. Leon van Rensburg would be delighted to help him, I'm sure; he is extremely happy to co-operate with the Morkels by past performance.

The M&G also speculates that Theuns's people and the Morkels are now having to cut deals to avoid hurting one another. This would be a change from the previous status quo because they worked together against the Metro liberals during the 2004 national candidate selection process.

This is all I can tell from this list. I'll try and find out more by talking to some of the delegates.

The Congress was faced with some issues that might well, if endorsed, have swung the provincial party in a conservative direction. A motion about the death penalty and of abortion came up, though phrased in nicely ambiguous terms by suggesting that the party needed 'leadership' on these issues, without actually endorsing a platform on its own. However, time problems prevented about half the motions, including this one, from getting to debate, which is very unfortunate. This time the problem was acute because Muslim delegates were struggling by the end of the day because it is Ramadaan. All outstanding motions have been referred to the Provincial Council for deliberation. The Council may adopt them, or refer them back to the next Congress.

My own motion on the defense of the Western Cape Provincial Constitution, which in my absence would have been proposed by Ian Neilson and Frank Raymond, has also been prorogued in this way.

HaloScan - no historical comments

2004-10-28T16:05:00.000+02:00

Haloscan has ditched all previous comments. Horrible, but can't be helped. I think the back-dated comments are still in Blogger, but invisible because I'm not using their system any longer.

COSATU being brave in Zimbabwe

2004-10-26T15:29:00.000+02:00

I very much hope that these guys will be safe; and I'm sure they will be. Strange as it may seem COSATU are not the first South African political organisation to go to Zimbabwe to make the point. Tony Leon's been there before on the same purpose. The DA sent a delegation of public representatives to discuss methods of government with the MDC mayor of Harare shortly after the last local elections there.

Still, it is obviously a lot easier for COSATU to undertake this kind of action safely; or, at least, I hope it is. It may also have more effect. The action will, of course, have no direct effect on Zimbabwean affairs, but that's not its purpose. The whole point of the COSATU action is to embarrass the South African government, not the Zimbabwean government.

So: Zimbabwean reformers out there - don't let this drop. It'll only work if the SA government and the ANC are left looking like fools. Which, on this topic at any rate, only remains to be demonstrated.

Worried about a death penalty policy

2004-10-26T08:12:00.000+02:00

I have a bad feeling about this. Doug Gibson, advocate that he is, might have defended a position he didn't necessarily endorse last night on Dennis Davis's show about the death penalty. But that's not how politics works.

Doug's actually one of the pro-death penalty free voters, and I've said before that he is entitled to his opinion. But the party's in the throes of its 'revisioning' (is that like exam revision, or is it about replacing a vision?). We approach a Federal Congress, the only venue at which an endorsement of policy change about the death penalty might be undertaken. To say things about the death penalty now amounts to kite-flying.

Some reasons to oppose the death penalty:

It is torture.
The Constitution invalidates it, and to support it is implicitly anti-constitutional
It does no good
Its victims can't be brought back to life, particularly following miscarriages of justice, but just as much if capital punishment is later rescinded from statute
It completely abandons any attempt at rehabilitation of criminals
It is the touchstone of retributive vigilantism, sanctioned by the state
It is a statutory license for violence
God knows apartheid South Africa's done enough harm with the death penalty in the past; so it's at least ironic, if not grotesque, to support it now

I'll let you know.

Questioning the President

2004-10-22T08:25:00.000+02:00

I find myself struggling to say anything intelligent about the President's Question Time yesterday.

Ryan Coetzee went into attack mode on the subject of rape, crime and HIV and AIDS. I've no doubt that some people will accuse him of disrespect to the President. Ryan got in his question and used two supplementaries to press the President for an answer that Mbeki was quite clearly unwilling to give. Does one press the President for answers? I surely think that this is what Question Time is for.

Ryan's published a statement this morning in which he flatly states he now questions whether Mbeki is fit to govern the country. This approach from the DA is entirely new. Until now we have doubted government policies, attacked the ideology of the ruling party and, on necessary occasions, inveighed against persons, like Tony Yengeni, in the government on matters such as corruption. What we have never done until now is doubted the President's fitness to govern the country. Ryan may possibly have gone too far in two ways: he may have trifled with the democratic mandate the President holds, and he may also have violated the DA's policy on attitudes to the government.

But, good grief, he has so much reason. I felt anguish, heartache, embarrassment seeing that man, our President, use his podium in Parliament to rail so dementedly about racism. The man seemed paranoid. He was almost confused. He seemed so patently unable to handle his interrogator. He seemed inarticulate. He seemed unable to calculate the impact of his words and phraseology.

I recall how in the past Thabo Mbeki was described as the intellectual President; how his academic successes and attitudes granted him a higher order of analysis of our nation's problems. He was to be practically a Platonic philosopher king. So much we expected of him; and such a titan has been cast down; and even his defenders know that their role is no longer to champion their hero but to defend his manifest weaknesses; that he is so dependent on those who like and support him; and we in the DA know so well now how easy it is to undermine this mere man, this President; and it is easier to feel pity than contempt.

I do not know where this leaves us. The President's inadequacies tell us nothing about the state of our nation and, whatever Ryan says, nothing about the fitness of the ruling party to rule. We are faced, perhaps, with the stalking shadow of the terrible anguished history of the exiles. So many of these brave men and women have returned in triumph as heroes; and we must only now comprehend how wandering Achilles is flawed.

Registration table at West Coast Village

2004-10-20T13:41:00.000+02:00

There's a fine shopping centre in Sunningdale called the West Coast Village. Unlike the Piazza in Parklands, they saw no problem with me organising a non-partisan registration campaign there.

I'm organising a dozen or so people to man a table at the West Coast Village during shopping hours on Saturday 6th November. We'll open up at 9am and stay open until 3pm or whenever the crowds thin out.

We'll be collecting names and phone numbers so that we can call people on weekends when the IEC opens registration stations. We'll also have the voters' roll available so people can check if their registration is valid.

Anyone reading this who'll be in the area is welcome to come around and meet me and the rest of us.

Parklands registration targets - a preliminary estimate

2004-10-20T13:32:00.000+02:00

I worked out some wildly inaccurate statistics yesterday, based on deductions I tried to draw from the voters' roll and the evil proprietary telephone database (EPTD). I'll start with the accurate stuff, and go on to the deductions.

The EPTD yields 720 new telephone numbers of houses that are not registered on the voters' roll. This excludes numbers of houses which are on the voters' roll, but whose occupants are not registered, which will happen when previously registered occupants leave and are replaced by new people who haven't registered. This gives us a baseline for how productive the EPTD can be for us right away. Re-registering the houses where registered voters have moved will do nothing but stabilise the present register, it will not increase it.

So how many people live in each house in Parklands? I took a sample of twenty streets, and counted how many people live at each registered house. I deduce that 1.72 voters live in each house of those twenty streets. So 720 houses becomes 1239 residents.

I think this is great news. It means we can get somewhere up to a thousand new DA voters just by getting these people registered, because 80% of Table View voters supported the DA in 2004.

How many people do we need to get voting DA before we win Ward 104? We're 4000 votes behind the ANC in what will be Ward 104 right now, and they'll also be registering people. So we need to catch up at least 4000 votes. I assigned an arbitrary 2000 additional ANC votes to Ward 104 by next year, which I think will be an ambitious target for the ANC in Doornbach and Dunoon.

This would mean we need 6000 additional DA voters. So we're already somewhere less than a sixth of the way there, just using the EPTD numbers.

I've done rough calculations from my sample of streets that suggests that our hit rate, if it follows through in the rest of the VD, might result in up to 9000 registrations in Parklands. The margin of error must be considered huge in this estimate, and I don't even have a way of calculating the margin right now. As statistics improve I'll get a better picture of how many registrations we can expect in Parklands.

What I'm saying is that Ward 104 is entirely winnable. It's just going to be a looooot of work!

DA, proud owners of Telkom

2004-10-20T08:35:00.000+02:00

Er, what? I hope this is some kind of satirical attack on BEE. I can think of better things that my R10 membership can be spent on than buying Telkom shares.

I'll write more when I know more. I suspect the party's not going to be buying any bits of Telkom itself, but instead organising people in groups who can buy shares themselves.

What could be the worst extent of arms deal corruption?

2004-10-18T14:14:00.000+02:00

Here is the sweet and low down of what some allege is the extent of corruption in the arms deal. It will be interesting to discover the extent to which these allegations are proven in the Shaik trial. Gonna get me a check list, yep.

Politics and game theory

2004-10-15T09:46:00.000+02:00

I admitted to being a constitution nut. I'm also a game theory nut!

Southampton University Electronics and IT researchers entered an 'Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma' competition. They won. The game has deep significance for the practice of politics, and the way they won has fundamental implications for how alliances are built and how they operate.

The prisoners' dilemma is a mathematical and philosophical game with two players and three rules. The two players are hypothetical prisoners, kept in separate cells and accused of the same crime. There's a deal on the table, which presents each prisoner with the option to turn state's witness, or to deny their involvement in the crime. Their decision is influenced by the three rules:

If they both turn state's witness, they both get two years in prison.
If they both deny their involvement, they both get four years in prison.
If one player turns state's witness, and the other denies involvement, the witness goes free and the other prisoner is imprisoned for five years.

You can see the dilemma - each prisoner doesn't know what the other will do, which must in some way influence their own decision.

The idea of performing this game multiple times allowed the Southampton University group to develop the concept of signalling. The University entered sixty different prisoners (actually little computer programs) in the run-off competition. The idea was that in any given iterative game their prisoners would play NOT to win, but to discover if the other player was a Southampton University entry. This is done by playing 'in Morse code', so to speak, by playing in a way that is recognisably Southampton-y.

If the prisoner decided the other prisoner was also a Southampton prisoner, the two programs had a decision-making system that allowed one of the two to sacrifice itself so that the other could win. But if the prisoner decided the other prisoner was not a Southampton prisoner, it automatically denied involvement in the crime for the rest of the game, which was its way of diminishing any advantage the other prisoner could win.

As the article states, Southampton prisoners came first, second and third - but the remaining fifty-seven entries all remained near the end of the entries, having sacrificed themselves for the benefit of their comrades.

Now, it's my belief that this has profound implications for political science. Think of the prisoners' dilemma as a series of games played between political groups who have no knowledge of one another's true intentions regarding an alliance between them. If both groups endorse the alliance, they allow one another to share a part of the political advantage. If they both reject the alliance, they will lose all advantage of co-operation and damage each other. If one endorses the alliance but the other rejects it, the rejector gains the advantage by sacrificing the other on the 'altar of expediency'.

What price the Coalition For Change, guys?

Ward 104 - triumph, and a bit of humble pie

2004-10-15T07:55:00.000+02:00

I've been debating with myself how to report this. The best approach seems to me simply to report on the facts, and on my state of mind about those facts.

The Municipal Demarcation Board has reissued maps of the proposed new ward boundaries for Cape Town and for the rest of the country. They've redrawn the proposed boundaries in Table View so that Parklands is included on the new eastern ward which also includes Dunoon and Doornbach.

My first reaction is joy at a triumph: Councillor Ian Neilson had appealed to the MDB to do just this. The DA can't take victory in Ward 104 for granted, but it now becomes a marginal winnable ward. My second reaction is shame at having accused the MDB of gerrymandering; the MDB has effectively agreed to concede the chance of Table View remaining an entirely DA suburb, and that means they can't be as beholden to the ANC as I'd stated. My third reaction is - good grief, there's a lot of work to do...