Precisely because he is clean and competent, Pappas is a red rag to the ANC

The ANC, it would seem, suffers from what one could describe as a Passas syndrome — an inability to see the speck in  your own eye and an eagerness to pull down those doing good or earning an honest living.

Some members of the ANC Youth League earned heaps of derision this month when they demonstrated in Howick calling for the resignation of uMngeni mayor Chris Pappas. “Arrest Passas now!” their posters screamed. The pass-one, pass-all mentality seems to have borne fruit. They didn’t misspell Pappas’s name; they corrupted it. But then corruption is something the party does very well.

Whatever message the youth league was trying to convey was instantly buried in the avalanche of mockery and abuse that followed. It was an own goal. The whole debacle dripped with shameless hypocrisy. The demonstrators condemned Pappas because his former fiancé is chair of a tourism outfit that received a grant of R100,000 from the municipality, but he has denied nepotism or corruption was involved.

The Pietermaritzburg CBD, like others where the comrades are in charge, is almost a rubbish dump

Being concerned about corruption is a good thing, and all upstanding citizens would welcome every effort to root it out. But if this was a genuine abhorrence of corruption, shouldn’t the ANC be sweeping its own backyard first? The ANC complaining or protesting against corruption is almost an oxymoron. The scourge has become its lifeblood. You stop it, and the party dies.

But of course this had nothing to do with corruption. It’s about Pappas himself. Not for what he’s done to the ANC or said about it. Young and energetic, he’s simply doing his job, and doing it well. His municipality is well-run, squeaky clean and debt-free, while ANC-run municipalities, almost without exception, are lawless, struggling under piles of filth and debt, service delivery is almost nonexistent and the apparatchiks are constantly caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

Pappas has been garlanded for putting his small town on the national and international map, not by shouting empty slogans, but by simply doing what he’s been elected to do. But instead of learning from him or beating him at his game, the ANC has decided to pull him down.

It’s a tactic it has tried to use in a few municipalities it doesn’t control. The party tried it, and failed, in Midvaal, Gauteng. But it’s been more successful, with the aid of the EFF, in turning some of the big metros into political playgrounds where the needs of the voters have taken a backseat. It is unconscionable that people’s rates and taxes are used to pay these yobbos’ salaries.

But uMngeni stands out — I guess that’s why Pappas is a red rag to the ANC bull — because it shines a light on a province that has probably the most corrupt and incompetent municipalities in the country. And that’s saying something.

Corruption has almost become a way of doing things. Down the road, Msunduzi, which includes Pietermaritzburg, has been under administration for four years. It has cash to last a few days and its financial situation is deteriorating. It could soon be unable to pay salaries unless the situation improves.

In May it went cap in hand to the National Treasury to ask for R400m to pay Eskom. The auditor-general said in her report that the municipality was “aiding” illegal electricity connections to 21,000 (since increased to 25,000) households at a cost of  more than R100m.

The Pietermaritzburg CBD, like others where the comrades are in charge, is almost a rubbish dump. But worse, the municipal authority’s pensioners have been unable to get their money because the municipality outsource the pension fund to a private company that  has since gone belly-up. As one pension protester remarked ruefully, the council was cynically dragging its feet and biding its time until all the pensioners were dead, and the problem went away.

Despite its financial troubles, Msunduzi has decided to fund a professional soccer team — owned by a woman who claims to be a billionaire — to the tune of R27m. It simply defies logic.

Durban, once the country’s tourism mecca, seems to have seen better days. The city centre is filthy, the beachfront — its golden goose — almost deserted and the sea polluted. And yet its mayor, Mxolisi Kaunda, an aspiring musician, is singing a different tune. He insists everything is hunky dory.

Pappas is not just another white man speaking fanakalo. He’s steeped in Zulu culture

His predecessor, Zandile Gumede, and some of her cronies,  are on trial for fraud, money laundering and corruption involving a R280m tender scam allegedly committed while she was mayor.

This week the provincial government bowed to pressure and cancelled plans to pay R28m for a music award function. The money would have included R3m for goody bags, among other things.

Yet Paul Mashatile insisted in parliament this week that his party gave government jobs only to the cream of the crop. “We only deploy the best,” he said. If what we’re seeing is the ANC’s finest, one shudders to think what its average Joes look like. But Mashatile also deliberately misses the point. It is not the duty of a political party to appoint or deploy people to government jobs. That has arguably been by far the biggest factor contributing to corruption and incompetence.

But what seems to be giving the ANC chest pains is the fact that Pappas is the DA’s premier candidate in the forthcoming election. His record of accomplishment in uMngeni will obviously stand him in good stead. And Pappas is not just another white man speaking fanakalo. He’s steeped in Zulu culture. He speaks the language even better than some mother-tongue speakers.

He makes a point of attending cultural events — he was at the inauguration of the Zulu king, for instance. And like other politicians such as President Cyril Ramaphosa and Ace Magashule, he has made the obligatory pilgrimage to the headquarters of the Shembe church, an important constituency especially in KwaZulu-Natal. So he ticks all the boxes, and he’ll be a formidable opponent in a province where, if polls are to be believed, the ANC could be hard-pressed to retain its majority.

But the only way to beat him, and win the affection of voters, is not to play the man but simply to emulate him.