BY GREG ROSENBERG
Millions of South Africans went to the polls November 1 in the country's first nonracial local government elections. With approximately 90 percent of polling stations reporting, the African National Congress had received 71 percent of votes cast.
With the election of nearly 700 metropolitan, urban, and rural councils, the remnants of the hated local structures of apartheid have been swept away. National and regional elections were held in April 1994, in which the ANC won a solid majority with 63 percent of the vote. Transitional town councils were then established in many local areas, charged with organizing democratic local elections.
The newly-elected local governments will administer combined areas that under apartheid were separated by law on the basis of "race." "Whites-only" cities were administered - and funded - separately from Black townships. Now Soweto, for instance, has been merged with parts of Johannesburg, which lies just a few miles to the northeast.
"Our country is today a democracy in the complete sense of the word," said ANC and South African president Nelson Mandela at a November 3 victory celebration in Johannesburg. "The people of South Africa have spoken. They have shown their resolve to unite the nation."
Directing his remarks to newly-elected local councilors, Mandela said that "a great responsibility now rests on your shoulders to ensure that you reciprocate the trust of the people by immediately establishing efficient and accountable government. Now is the time to roll up your sleeves and work with the communities to build a better life."
An important advance for the ANC was the broader support it won from those classified under apartheid as Coloured, especially in the Western Cape region, previously said to have been a center of support for the National Party. The ANC won electoral majorities in all major cities, with the exception of central Pretoria.
For the past year, ANC leaders have emphasized need the for democratically-elected and authoritative local governments in order to address the economic, political, and social legacy of apartheid. These structures are essential in implementing the Congress's Reconstruction and Development Program, which was subsequently adopted by the Government of National Unity.
Reconstruction program
Speculation was rife in the big-business press that the
elections would register declining support for the ANC, due
to a "failure to deliver" widespread improvements in the
standard of living and quality of life across the country
for the impoverished majority.
Despite the slow pace of transforming basic conditions of life for most working people, however, the anticipated backlash did not arise. The vast majority of rural and urban toilers see the ANC as their own.
Local authorities that were holdovers from the days of white rule have held decision-making power over the allocation of the most basic resources - including roads, electricity, and water. If roads exist at all in black townships, few are paved. More than 10 million people in South Africa have no access to running water or electricity.
In Upington, a town on the banks of the Orange River in the Northern Cape province, for example, water rights were to play a prominent role in the election. ANC campaigners pointed out that the former town council had favored white farmers along a thin strip of green land while denying water to thousands of blacks.
"When the ANC gets into power... we'll introduce our plans to pipe water deep into the Kalahari to assist those in need," said ANC election coordinator Jan Piet.
"You can't just pump water anywhere," responded Stoffel Lombard of the Northern Cape Agricultural Union, an organization of capitalist landowners. "There are rules and regulations."
"If farmers don't have enough water, then the local people can't have jobs," said National Party spokesperson Johannes de Klerk.
Maid runs against her boss
While a breakdown of its candidates was not available at
press time, ANC local slates in various urban and rural
areas included working people. In Morgan's Bay, a small
town on the coast of the Indian Ocean, Ntombizodwa Nonqayi,
a maid, challenged her boss for a seat on the town council.
Nonqayi works for Pebs Saunders, a real estate agent decked out in a five-bedroom house, who pays her maid $80 a month. Nonqayi lives in a hut without electricity or water, and is determined to fight to improve housing and living conditions for the region's impoverished blacks.
Preliminary results showed capitalist parties collectively garnering about 30 percent of the vote. The National Party of South African deputy-president F.W. de Klerk won about 20 percent, the Democratic Party 1 percent, the rightist Freedom Front 5 percent, the pro-apartheid Conservative Party 1.5 percent, and smaller parties taking the rest.
Voting in Cape Town was put off until next year due to a dispute over election boundaries. Similarly, in KwaZulu- Natal province, the political base of the reactionary Inkatha Freedom Party, a political fight took place over when elections would be held. They have also been postponed until next March.
With no voting in KwaZulu-Natal, Inkatha received less than one percent of the vote. The Pan-Africanist Congress got about one percent as well. The ultraright Afrikaner Resistance Movement boycotted the poll.
In the Eastern Cape, where the ANC polled about 83 percent of the vote, National Party leader Tertius Delport complained that "we expected the liberation euphoria to have petered out. The support we expected from black voters did not materialize."
The makeup of the councils has yet to be announced, since a "stacking arrangement" that favors minority parties is in force. This was negotiated during multiparty negotiations leading up to last year's nonracial national election. An ANC statement said this would mean "that in the majority of cases a significant number more votes will be needed to win a seat in the black areas, than in the former Indian, Coloured and white areas."
Magnus Malan, generals are arrested
On November 2, former South African defense minister
Magnus Malan and five other generals, along with six other
former senior military officials were arrested. They
included former defense force chief Gen. Jannie Geldenhuys,
army chief Gen. Kat Liebenberg, spy master Gen. Neels van
Tonder, along with a senior official of Inkatha. Malan was
defense minister from 1980 to 1991.
Charged with the 1987 murder of 13 blacks in KwaZulu- Natal in what was to have been an assassination of a local ANC leader, the indictment says that Malan and his generals organized an Inkatha hit squad, which was trained, paid, and deployed by the South African Defense Force.
The charges brought howls of protest from deputy- president de Klerk and other former apartheid officials, who insisted Malan should receive amnesty. But KwaZulu- Natal attorney general Tim McNally said he was acting strictly according to the law.
"The only way now that somebody can get amnesty is through the Truth Commission," set up to expose apartheid- era crimes, said ANC spokesperson Carl Niehaus. Malan has insisted on his innocence. To win amnesty, someone appealing to the Truth Commission must confess his or her crime.
Under the state of emergency imposed by the apartheid regime in the 1980s alone, at least 30,000 people were detained without trial. Thousands of others were murdered, disappeared, or tortured.