What do a former Bok coach, an ex-police chief, a media personality and a poo-chucking activist have in common? They’re among the candidates contesting the local government elections.
Well over 60,000 South Africans are standing for November’s local government elections – and the lists of candidates and parties released by the Independent Electoral Commission are as diverse as the population itself.
She was also criticised earlier this year after a video emerged of her eating chicken feet while campaigning at an informal settlement in Johannesburg in May “for the sake of the vote”, to quote the words she is heard saying in the video. The IEC’s lists reveal that the splintering of the electorate into laagers based on identity, long predicted by analysts, is very real. Young South Africans can vote for the Youth Independence Party and Youth Associates in some wards; those longer in the tooth may want to opt for the Disability and Older Person Political Party.
But the lists do reveal some anomalies to the wider trend of groupings based on race or religion. In the Western Cape, there are at least two black candidates running for a party often assumed to be the sole province of white Afrikaners: the Freedom Front Plus. The ANC’s youngest candidate is 20-year-old white student Christiaan Carstens, running in Jeffrey’s Bay in the Eastern Cape.
Proving that factionalism is not just for the ANC and DA but can afflict even those political outfits in touch with a higher power, the African Christian Democratic Party is seeing at least three rival Christian parties contesting the polls led by disenchanted former ACDP figures: the Africa Restoration Alliance, the United Progressive Party of SA and Change.
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