If you were to draw up a list of the 10 most urgent things that must happen to turn Nelson Mandela Bay into the best little city in the world, what would top your list?
Eradicate poverty? Stop using our city as a dump? Repair the collapsing infrastructure? Fire corrupt officials?
A political leadership that reflects the will of the people? Intensive effort to stop the murders, sexual abuse and violent crime?
Get schools working? Grow industry to drive jobs? Those are all important. But they are secondary to something more fundamental.
And it’s something we are all guilty of.
Let us use a recent concrete example to see if you agree.
Last week, Wednesday September 18, we had a byelection in Ward 20.
Ward 20 covers a good bit of Kwazakhele.
The reason we had a byelection is that the 2016 elected ANC councillor is now in jail for corruption.
The wheels of justice have turned, found him guilty and sent him directly to jail.
Kwazakhele is one of our neighbourhoods in deep crisis.
It has seen in the region of 14 necklacings in the last two months.
The police precinct reports one of the highest murder counts in SA.
Over 50% of the youth in that community are unemployed.
Municipal services are not coping, as evidenced by the unofficial trash dumps lining many pavements.
So if there is one place in the city that we have to get it right, Ward 20 – Kwazakhele – is that place.
In the last local government elections, August 2016, the ANC took Ward 20 with 72% of the vote.
This time, three years later, it again won comfortably with nearly 67% of the vote.
In 2016, the runner-up was the EFF, with just over 10% of the vote.
On Wednesday last week, the UDM had the second highest vote tally at close to 14% of the votes cast.
The DA went from just under 5% to just over 5%.
The EFF lost voter representation, as did the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) – as compared to the United Front that ran in 2016.
By comparison, just a few months ago, the ANC won that ward with 79% of the vote in our national elections.
The EFF came in second with 13%, the DA received just over 2% and the UDM and SRWP both just over 1%.
The voting of that ward has been consistent.
Over two-thirds of the residents vote ANC every time.
Though the ANC ward vote has been in decline in the past two municipal elections, it has been by very small amounts.
The results differ between municipal and national, but the message is clear: this is overwhelmingly an ANC ward – irrespective of whether the previous councillor is now a convicted criminal, the president is Jacob Zuma or Cyril Ramaphosa, or how well other parties ran their campaigns.
It is a picture that repeats across all our 60 wards.
Voters have been consistent in their choices over the years.
There is some fluctuation when a new party arrives or departs, COPE and the EFF being examples thereof.
But on the whole, voters of Nelson Mandela Bay overwhelmingly choose either the ANC or the DA on a ward basis and their choices change only slightly over time.
Why is the focus on numbers so important?
Because our best indicator of future behaviour is past behaviour. Humans tend to be consistent in their choices.
The question party political strategists face is this: what will the next local government elections in 2021 bring?
Will this picture as seen in Ward 20 change much?
It is unlikely. There are a handful of wards where the contestation for votes is tight, but it is most probable that current voting choices will largely be repeated in 2021.
And therein lies both the crisis and opportunity.
Our mayor is smoking his socks if he thinks the city is not dysfunctional.
He may not want to believe the business chamber, he may want to deflect attention by suggesting he is a victim of some hidden agenda, he can pretend daily service protests are a figment of some conspiracy, but if you walk through Kwazakhele, the on-theground reality is plain to see.
Our city is in trouble. Serious trouble.
Our primary challenge as a city is not in identifying our problems, it is seeing where the solutions lie, specifically how our systems can do something about it.
And the most fundamental system, the foundation upon which we grow, is a functioning local government.
This is not on the mayor, this is on the two parties that together hold 107 of the 120 seats in council, the DA and the ANC.
We face three broad choices going forward: administration of some kind, ride it out until 2021, or find a workable compromise between the two parties that together account for nearly 90% of the city’s vote.
The DA and the ANC can ride out the next two years in the hope that 2021 will bring change in voters’ choices, that the power balance will shift in their favour.
But very little has changed on a local level over the last three years. Even with a change in president and mayor, voters in Kwazakhele stuck to the same choices they made last time, and the time before.
If voters do the same in 2021, the current strategy of waiting it out will bear no fruit. It will simply allow the city to decline even further.
So the question to every politician in our city is this: How far is too far?
If working together is unpalatable, is the daily reality of life in Kwazakhele less so?
● Gary Koekemoer, PhD candidate and Wessa Algoa Bay branch chair