The reason often given as to why SA holds municipal polls separately from a general election is that it is to avoid local issues being overshadowed by national considerations.
Critics of the arrangement argue it is a waste of time and resources because the Independent Electoral Commission has to organise an election every two and a half years.
But supporters of the status quo say if we were to have elections for national, provincial and local governments all on the same day, municipalities would suffer the most.
Local issues would be neglected, and the electorate would tend to vote more along their national leadership preferences even at the local level, where the delivery of basic services ought to be the main consideration.
Instead of choosing between candidates A and B at the ward level − based on which one of them is most likely to represent the ward better at council − the voter would be swayed mainly by which political leader or party they back at the national level.
But can we genuinely say that municipal elections are mostly determined by local issues, rather than national politics?
Take Johannesburg, for instance, and the mayoral race that has informally begun there. What is local about it currently?
Political parties − big and small, new and long-established − are busy announcing their mayoral candidates for the November 4 elections. But in most of these announcements one is left with the feeling that it is all a dry run for the 2029 general elections and has little to do with the issues affecting the city.
Perhaps this is because of the candidates some of the more prominent parties have chosen as faces for their campaigns. The DA set the tone by naming veteran politician and former Western Cape premier Helen Zille as its candidate − thus giving the battle for Jozi’s mayoral chain a “national dimension”.
ActionSA − a party led mainly by political figures who split from the DA around 2018 − followed suit by naming Herman Mashaba, its leader and former DA mayor in Johannesburg, as its candidate.
Ever since then, everybody else seems to have been scrambling to come up with a candidate with some national profile.
Rise Mzansi, for instance, this past weekend named ex-Cope activist-turned-political-analyst-turned-PowerFM-talk-show-host Lukhona Mnguni as the face of their bid to win Joburg.
The ANC, which has run the city for most of the past three decades, is still embroiled in a protracted process to choose a name acceptable enough to the voters to make them forget about its transgressions in power.
However, if news reports are anything to go by, it too would choose a political figure “with a national profile” to try and fend off Zille, Mashaba and the others hankering for control of SA’s richest city.
All of this would be good for Jozi if it translated to gaining seasoned political leaders with demonstrable capacity to turn the troubled city and its institutions around.
But the past five years of various coalition governments running the city have been characterised by the appointment of mayors so out of their depth they were prone to score more own goals than an Orbit College team facing Orlando Pirates in a do-or-die game.
One doubts that the “national figures” would improve the calibre of leaders in the Johannesburg council after the elections. Some of them pay so little attention to explaining to voters what they would do differently were they to win that one is left with the impression that they are in the race merely to test their parties’ strength ahead of the next general elections.
Others announce detailed manifestos but leave you wondering if they’ll stick around long enough after the polls. Would Zille, for instance, have the appetite to stay on and lead her party caucus in opposition if she ends up not being mayor?
Mashaba didn’t in 2022 once it became clear that ActionSA had not won enough seats to get him the mayoral chain. It is unlikely he’ll stay on as an ordinary councillor this time if the party performs poorly in the city again.
Once the election campaign dust has settled and a new Johannesburg coalition government is elected, most of these “national figures” currently dominating the discourse about the city would have moved on to new causes.
Voters should guard against being blinded by the glitz and glamour surrounding the “national figures” to the point where they miss what matters the most − ward candidates and the PR list.
If, at ward level, voters choose candidates that are not up to the task and go with PR lists full of names with no capacity to turn Joburg around, the city will be doomed − with or without any of the celebrity “national figures” as mayor.
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