Political Promises Coming Home to Roost in Cape

PROMISES, promises, promises. They have a habit of coming back to bite politicians, and Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu had better invest in a pair of chain-mail trousers if she wants to avoid paying the price for some of her provincial colleagues' past whoppers.

Sisulu denies the government has ever promised every South African a free home, and a perusal of official policy documents confirms this; only the poorest of the poor qualify for RDP matchboxes. But pre-election campaigning seldom bears much resemblance to the dry policy approved by Pretoria, particularly in a closely contested province such as Western Cape. But if local politicians haven't been making extravagant promises, they have not gone out of their way to correct unrealistic expectations.

The protesters who wrecked show houses and caused havoc on the N2 highway near Langa outside Cape Town several times during the morning rush hour last week not only believe they are due proper homes to replace their shacks, but expect them to be built by the government for free and on the same site. Unfortunately, the land in question is earmarked for the N2 Gateway project, and it is impossible to build multistorey residential blocks on top of wood, plastic and corrugated iron structures.

Even worse from the protesters' point of view is the fact that most of the new houses will be allocated according to lengthy housing waiting lists, and few of those now occupying the land would qualify as buyers on economic grounds in any event. So, for the majority, their "temporary" relocation to outlying parts of the metropolitan area during the construction phase will be permanent.

Hence the accusation that the government is about to resort to forced removals of the kind that are synonymous with apartheid. Denials ring hollow given that people will indeed have to move if construction is to take place, and if they refuse to go voluntarily force is the only option. The fact that it would be court-sanctioned is irrelevant to those concerned. Sisulu is in a corner -- she cannot give in to anarchy and vandalism if this "presidential lead project" is to be completed before 2010, but she also can't avoid the fact that most of the protestors have little to lose.

The minister has not helped her cause by complaining that the protesters have legitimate channels for their grievances while simultaneously accusing the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) of being behind the action. The PAC has come close to being annihilated by the floor-crossing shenanigans that ended at the weekend, with just one PAC MP left in the National Assembly. And Sisulu expects poor, homeless PAC voters to put their faith in the institutions of a sham democracy?

To pile irony on ironies, the floor-crossing period also saw the African National Congress (ANC) increasing its dominance of the Western Cape provincial legislature, at a time when the party's popularity on the ground was taking a hammering over the housing issue and its heavy-handed response to Cape Town mayor and national Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Helen Zille's anti-drug drive. Zille may have flirted with populism by joining in a high-profile anti-drug and gangsterism march on the Cape Flats, but that isn't the point. Nobody should be arrested for participating in a peaceful protest, and if it was a deliberate political ploy on Zille's part it was pretty darn successful.

Western Cape community safety MEC Leonard Ramatlakane's iron fist and blustering justifications have alienated the few friends that the ANC had left in the coloured communities that have been hardest hit by the province's drug and crime epidemic, while Zille's collection of brownie points is starting to look big enough to give the DA a real shot at taking the province come 2009.

The truth is that both the province and the city have taken significant strides in the war against the drug and crime syndicates, including high-profile arrests, the closure of large drug manufacturing operations and the eviction of dealers from council-owned properties. So successful have these initiatives been that the street prices of substances such as "tik" have rocketed. If the two levels of government could only work together, the gains might even be entrenched. - Business Day