It is June 17 2011, almost a month after the local government elections. On this Friday afternoon, DA leader Helen Zille is criss-crossing Nelson Mandela Bay’s northern areas as part of her party’s "Thank You" tour, visiting voters.
Dressed in a party shirt and jeans, Zille is riding with DA supporters in a blue double-decker bus and they are dancing to victory tunes at high volume. She exudes energy and enthusiasm as she waves to excited onlookers. They wave back at her.
The bus driver hoots at crowds lining the streets in the northern suburbs — from Gelvandale and Helenvale to Bethelsdorp and surrounds — creating a jubilant atmosphere.
Zille and her party, and its supporters, have much to celebrate. In these 2011 local government elections, the DA has managed to cut the ANC’s share of the vote to just more than 50% in Nelson Mandela Bay and the blue brigade has done this by making significant inroads in previous ANC strongholds in the metro.
In preceding elections, the governing party had notched up comfortable wins that left the opposition licking its wounds. Not this time.
Although it has not clinched the first prize — unseating the ANC from government in the metropolitan council — the DA has put in a respectable performance that has tilted the balance of power in the metro. The ANC’s majority is slim and the DA has enough seats to ensure decisions are not easily rammed through the council, as had been the case for years before.
Political infighting was the ANC’s undoing, and opposition parties including the DA, took advantage of this.
What is noteworthy about Zille’s tour on this Friday is that she is visiting poor areas in the Bay with a majority of coloured and black voters — not the municipality’s mostly white and relatively affluent suburbs considered the main source of the DA’s support.
During the 2006 municipal elections, one could not have imagined a DA leader campaigning in these neighbourhoods and receiving a warm reception, but five years is a lifetime in politics. The DA’s persistence and strategy, which was to target wards once dominated by the ANC, paid dividends where it mattered: at the polls.
Most residents in these wards had long bemoaned dysfunction in the municipality, which often manifested in a lack of proper service provision in their neighbourhoods. They had also complained bitterly about rigged RDP housing lists and a general state of administrative malaise creeping into the municipality.
The DA tapped into the communities’ grievances and packaged itself as a better alternative to the ANC.
On this victory tour, Zille took a swipe at her political opponents by telling DA supporters that, unlike the ANC, her party did not abandon voters after elections but came back to engage.
When it was courting Nelson Mandela Bay voters, the DA promised to bring in a clean administration and good governance to the metro, whose residents had become accustomed to ANC internal politics taking precedence over running the municipality.
Then in August 2016, the DA took control of the metro. It gained power through a coalition partnership that included the United Democratic Movement. The arrangement has been characterised by volatility of the same kind that beset the ANC when it was in power.
Bay voters have demonstrated during every election since 2006 that they have no appetite for political squabbles that distract officials and waste resources — they want a party or parties that will get on with governing.
The DA will have to tread carefully if it doesn’t want the voters in this metro to do to it what they did to the ANC.
• Phillip is news editor.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.