The Karoo town with junk status
The political has become personal for the people of Oudtshoorn, reports Craig Dodds.
|||Oudtshoorn - Litter erupts in a multicoloured rash from the dusty fields of Mandela Heights in Oudtshoorn, where horses graze amid an overflowing rubbish tip.
Down the road, in Rose Valley, a temporary housing site is festooned with plastic bottles, empty milk cartons and the limp remains of ancient plastic bags.
The sloot demarcating the boundary between older shacks built with planks and sheets of corrugated iron, and the gleaming zinc structures erected for those waiting for their new homes, oozes a grey-green sludge, choking on rubbish which a toddler inspects for objects of interest.
These are the welts left on the face of the town by a political disease it could not shake since the previous local government elections bequeathed it by a hung council, with the ANC and DA in near deadlock at 42 percent and 46 percent of the vote respectively.
A fragile ANC-led coalition hung on to power until by-elections in 2013, when a DA-Cope combination won a majority, but the ANC fought on in the courts, meanwhile failing to hold council meetings so as to avoid removal through a vote of no confidence.
There were allegations these legal manoeuvres were being funded from the Cango Caves trust, while corruption, bribery, intimidation and financial mismanagement cases landed in the in-trays of Sars, the Hawks and Special Investigating Unit.
Municipal managers and chief financial officers came and went and the municipality plunged into financial crisis, taking on staff it couldn’t afford and paying them with money earmarked for infrastructure construction and maintenance.
Sewage began to gush into riverbeds, rubbish collection trucks broke down and were never repaired. The political became personal for the people of Oudtshoorn.
Magdalena Hendriks is bitter.
“You must help your community, you can’t just take the money,” she fumed.
“At the end of your term you must be able to show what you’ve achieved - jislaaik, you get cross, really, the municipality doesn’t deliver for us.”
She and her husband, a gardener, scrape together the money to pay for electricity and water, but she said she couldn’t even put on the kettle while she cooks for fear of tripping the power and having to wait half an hour for it to come back on.
“We have to go back to paraffin lamps or gas; we can’t anymore.”
Godwin Wolhuter, 27, and his friends fended off the tedium of their eternal joblessness with a game of street cricket in Mandela Heights.
It’s a struggle to get on the indigent list for free basic services, he says.
“You go and apply, then they call you and say you didn’t qualify or your form wasn’t filled in properly.
“Then you have to go back to the police station, fill in all those forms again to show you’re unemployed, copy of your ID, household income, all of that - then send it again.”
Standing at short leg with his back to a fence, Ronnie Rollison, 45, chimed in.
“I’ve been on the housing waiting list since 1997, but it doesn’t work like that anymore,” he said.
“I helped free this country and I’ve never got anything from this municipality, not even a job. I was in jail to free this county. To get a house it’s favours for friends. That’s why the municipality is under administration. You must know the right people, move in the right group.”
Nor has the DA, which finally gained control of the council last year after a court case, only to relinquish it to an administrator, covered itself in glory.
An attempt to sneak into power by luring ANC defectors was overturned by a court in 2013.
Its failure to act against the Eden District Municipality mayor, Wessie van der Westhuizen - a councillor from Oudtshoorn - after he committed travel claims fraud, caused outrage.
Connie Stuurman, 66, has seen enough of politicians or, rather, too little.
“I’m not a voter because you don’t vote for a person. You vote for people, and you don’t know them,” he said.
“The party members are canvassing now and that’s the only time you see them.”
Annelise Campher, 29, has been living in the temporary zinc-house settlement in Rose Valley for three years, waiting for her new house.
The ditch behind her house is used as a dump because it’s already full of rubbish, she said, and the tap she gets her water from is dry because the pipe is broken.
“We’ve been to complain but they take no notice,” she said.
Serena Julies, 30, was equally disgusted.
People use the ditch as a toilet because the shared portable toilets are too far and the rain pours into her shack in winter.
“We have to catch the water or we’ll drown. They must finish our houses, work properly so we get our houses,” she said.
The country was “on its back” but she would continue voting for the ANC out of respect for Nelson Mandela.
“If another party takes over, maybe it will be better, but I haven’t decided yet to vote for another party.”
James Swigelaar, 69, a former mayor and one-time DA councillor, is ashamedof what’s become of the town, once a flourishing tourist destination, world renowned for the Cango Caves and its unique Karoo scenery.
“I blame all the politicians who were there - the DA as well as the ANC - for what they have done,” he said.
Who to vote for will be a last-minute decision.
Right then, he trusted no one.
Oudtshoorn factbox
Population: 95 933
Municipal elections 2011:
* Turn-out: 62.3 percent of registered voters
* DA 46 percent; ANC 42 percent; Cope 3 percent; Icosa 3 percent; NPP 2 percent; ACDP 2 percent; Sapco 1 percent; VF+ 1 percent
National elections 2014:
* Turn-out: 65.6 percent of registered voters
* DA 51 percent; ANC 37 percent; Icosa 5 percent; VF+ 2 percent; EFF 1 percent; Cope 1 percent; ACDP 1 percent; AIC 1 percent
* Languages: Afrikaans 89 percent; Xhosa 5 percent; English 2 percent
* 10 percent of the 21 910 households (Census 2011) live in shacks, compared to the provincial average of18.2 percent in the Western Cape
* Average (median) monthly income: R2 400
- Source: Wazimap by Media Monitoring Africa
craig.dodds@inl.co.za
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