Mayor Conrad Poole has been removed from his position following a motion of no confidence tabled by opposition parties during a council sitting.

The motion, prompted by an alleged "pay-for-jobs" scandal, resulted in Poole losing the vote by a margin of 34 to 26, with two abstentions.

The DA has since boasted that the municipality is one of the best in the country, and that this won’t affect service delivery.

This is utter nonsense.

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Drakenstein

The DA government in Drakenstein Municipality is half the reason I vote VF+ (the other half being Cape independence). My family have voted for the DA and all its previous Liberal incarnations back to the SAP, even before South Africa was a country.

But the condescending, corrupt and arrogant way in which DA officials handle complaints, dodge public meetings, shirk responsibility and waste public funds made me ruthlessly angry.

They refuse to take complaints seriously, and even pay hundreds of thousands of rands to stalk local activists on social media, and have banned several from attending public hearings, and in one case, even barred a local VF+ member, Christine Marais, from using the local SeeClickFix app for reporting potholes and other infrastructural issues.

In general, the DA councillors have a remarkably stupid way of dealing with each and every problem, and are wildly inconsistent. All of which is more obviously embarrassing when one considers how trivial these issues are in comparison with the Augean stables to be cleared in other districts.

As a small example, when my ward councillor was brought down to deal with a beehive in a 400-year old oak tree, instead of calling any of the numerous local beekeepers who would do it for free, chose to send a crew of municipal workers with chainsaws to hack the whole thing down. All of them got stung, though as far as I know, none were hospitallised.

They tell us all year round that upkeep of the river and protecting us from the burglars that use it as a rat-run for their stolen goods, is not only none of their responsibility, but because of how they zoned it, it would be illegal for us to pay for private security to monitor the river. Then just before municipal elections, they send a huge team of labourers to mow down every sprig of vegetation along its banks and weld massive ugly fences around all the bridges, which used to be so picturesque that the local highschoolers would come by just to take their matric dance photos.

They refuse to deal with homelessness. They have no oversight over street cleaning, road repairs, or law enforcement, the latter of which have never lifted a finger to do anything. Drug users aren't cleared away by law enforcement even when they smoke and drink outside local schools and creches.

Their latest addition is a Safety and Security official who is dedicated to neutering all private and community safety initiatives and making sure everything gets handled exclusively by our famously corrupt and incompetent SAPS (despite drastic local staffing shortages), and has made no secret about her opinion that Cape Town’s devolution strategies are her nemesis that she will spare no sweat to defeat here.

The same official presided over a disastrous riot control operation in Swellendam, where she was so keen to keep community safety out of the loop that people didn't even know which roads were safe to drive on and often ended up driving into violent scenes.

But while the DA has no meaningful capacity to contain left-wing sentiment in their ranks, the arrogance and condescension is par for the course.

The road running past my cousin’s farm has not been tarred since it was promised 80 years ago (a promise regularly renewed), though a tiny section was completed a few years ago, and another short section in the late 1970s. Paarl seldom remembers to replace the lightbulbs in their streetlights. Vagrants wielding bladed weapons on the main road are not dealt with, while rights to run paid public parking in Lady Gray Street have been sold off to local millionaires.

The river running past my house used to have a deepwater channel running down its length, which has not been dredged in decades. As a result, every winter sees a massive rush of floodwater cutting through the undefended river banks, and several of my neighbours’ houses literally overhang sheer screes by several feet, threatening to tip into the rapids next the waters come through.

Almost every bridge and culvert along the Spruit and Krom rivers is crumbling, and despite this being known from studies performed ten years ago, the municipality hid the information from the national water department, which I found out after handing the report to the WA rep in a public hearing, to the visible chagrin of the municipal manager.

When I and my neighbours first complained about the erosion in the Spruit river’s municipal culverts, which have forced my family to fill sinkholes threatening to swallow our generations-old family house up, we got a visit from officials who insisted that this multi-million rand public works upgrade was our responsibility, because in the arcane and byzantine 4-dimensional zoning matrix they have set up, the river is both our responsibility, and something we have no right to act on, because it is an “open space”.

My first visit on this topic from was from an official who boasted that there was “an interesting story” behind his limited edition sportscar, about which he would tell me if he "got to know me better". Lifestyle audits are overdue.

On that same afternoon, they bullied my neighbour of 30 years, a woman who has been a second mother to me, to tears, because her complaints were in their eyes irrelevant and stupid.

A few years ago, another riparian neighbour of mine simply reinforced the bank illegally on his own steam with river rocks, concrete and vagrant labour, receiving threats of litigation which, due to the indefatigable stupidity and laziness of the local council, never materialised.

The Streets are crumbling and are hardly ever repaired or cleaned. Buildings earmarked for homeless shelters are rented out to local businesses while the municipality claims they have nowhere to place vagrants.

Corrupt practices and cynical local bylaws have crippled waste disposal, leading to an unsustainable flytipping problem, and despite promises to the contrary, Drakenstein has insisted on pushing ahead with a shady deal for a waste-to-energy plant that is wildly overpriced and known to be environmentally unsound, using special grants from the ANC-run national government to get around local objections after it was shot down.

Poole’s practice of stuffing the municipality with jobs for friends and family has been common knowledge in the area for years, and is the least of our problems. Poole's removal was supported by all opposition parties, including the ANC, GOOD Party, Freedom Front Plus, Patriotic Alliance, and Al-Jamaah. A new mayor will be elected within 14 days to replace Poole, who will no doubt change nothing. The entire house needs clearing out.

Drakenstein is one of the worst indebted municipal governments in the province, and their “clean audits” mean absolutely nothing, because auditors don’t care whether tenders are overpriced, whether employees are wasteful parasites, or whether the elected officials are paying outside consultants to do all their work for them. Millions in written-off debts are shrugged off as the price of doing business.

And to make up for all of this, instead of cutting wasteful expenditure and trimming the fat, they hike up local rates.

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This is systemic

To understand why the DA's governance has declined so precipitously, one must look at the party's overall strategic culture.

The clean audit excuse may fly in cozy little City cocktail parties and jittery housewives afraid of the ANC or of looking too provincial by voting VF+, but anyone who has looked at the decades of systematic corruption in the Garden Route will know the DA have no interest in protecting their residents, and merely wish to use the Western Cape as a launchpad for their national career ambitions, as my colleague Leo Barnes has argued well.

The Executive Committee goes out of its way to protect rotten cadres they feel are easily manipulable, despite earnest attempts by the Cape branch to do the right thing. I have written a lengthy article about Bitou and Garden Route, which is due for an update soon.

As Aleksi Cohen pointed out on Twitter, the DA have very little regard for locals. According to the Western Cape Province gazette, Knysna should qualify for tens of millions in emergency support funding that has been provisioned for municipalities facing similar conditions.

Instead, they are squeezing the municipality in order to exacerbate the poor governance of the ANC coalition which has displaced them. Under DA administrations in Knysna, parity between National and Provincial funding was far greater. In 2017/18 it was nearly 1:1, and in 2019/21 it was roughly 2:1.

The proportion of National to Provincial funding received 2022/23 was 26:1

As Aleksi put it:

“The DA are waging war on Knysna's residents. They've engineered the crisis and now they're using for political grandstanding. All to discipline the citizens of the WC. They hope to show the electorate the perils of coalition government. And punish former strongholds. It's no coincidence the residents of non-DA wards like Khayalethu and Hornlee suffer while those of Leisure Island and other DA-wards are merely inconvenienced. The disparity in service delivery between wards is likely a consequence of long term appointments made by the DA […] many have raised the contention that Province under funding Knysna is for the best—as the ANC will simply steal any money. However, in 2019/20 an auditor reported ~R68m of irregular spend in the DA's Knysna. A large share of the budget simply vanished.”

And the DA’s losses to the PA are not merely a function of Coloured racial consciousness. In the Karoo districts, water quality has been declining for years.

My little peek into Bitou and Garden Route gave me an insight into how the DA run things which is hard to unsee. The party executive will often override decisions made by the caucus, local branches or provincial council in order to secure candidates they wish to groom for places higher up later on. These little creeps have firm party loyalty, but because of their protection, feel free to engage in disreputable behaviour with no fear of consequences.

Worse, there is reason to suspect that local DA councillors even interfere in elections. The DA are not alone in this, but one generally expects better.

I have no doubt that the DA have sounder accountants. I have no doubt that their services are less egregiously neglectful or kleptocratic than the ANC. But in any real, self-respecting country their conduct would be despised, and it is not as if we do not have alternatives to choose from.

What strikes me above all of this is how cynical their opposition to Cape independence and meaningful devolution is. After 15 years in power with nothing to show for it in the way of devolution efforts, they now insist they will fix everything by asking permission from the ANC to do so (the Provincial Powers Bill). Meanwhile, they choke out the VF+ bill that has the actual power to achieve such things without ANC approval.

As a friend recently pointed out to me, an independent Cape may well get us an "independent DA" - a DA unfettered by interference by Macchiavellian creatures in the national ExCo, whose national ambitions are so hubristic and devoid of principal they bear almost no relation to reality, moral or material.

Every man and his dog knows the DA will never govern SA, unless they get into bed with the ANC. But maybe that won’t be such a difficult marriage after all.

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