SOUTH AFRICA: For ANC stalwarts, the loss of Cape Town is an almost intolerable insult, writes Joe Humphreys
Cape Town is a divided city, as anyone who arrives by its main airport road will testify.
Before you reach the affluence of the business district or the swanky hotels and restaurants of the Victoria & Alfred (V&A) Waterfront you must pass row after row of makeshift tin homes - homes that stretch towards one of South Africa's biggest and most deprived informal settlements.
With local wealth visibly concentrated in white hands, some parts of the city are oddly reminiscent of the apartheid era.
Others parts don't seem to belong to Africa at all. (In the case of the V&A, it literally doesn't belong to Africa - having been bought for 7 billion Rand [ €730 million] last month by a UK-Dubai business consortium.) Understandably, then, Cape Town generates mixed - and often strong - emotions. Fred Khumalo, an award-winning author, spoke for many of his compatriots recently when he wrote that he both loved and hated the city.
"With all its beauty, Cape Town is a metaphor for the times we live in as South Africans: a splendiferous life for the chosen few and a vile, sad and maddening existence for the majority. You see this sadness, this uncertainty in the eyes of Capetonians of all colours. Many of the darkies in Cape Town have a staring-into-the-empty- distance look in their eyes. Many of the whiteys won't look you in the eye. Shifty. The coloureds stare defiantly into your eyes, as if asking: what do you want here?"
The political realm is equally divided, and arguably more so now than at any previous time in the post-apartheid era.
The Mother City, as the port settlement "founded" by Dutch explorers is popularly known, is currently hosting the Mother of All Battles between South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), and a mixed bag of opposition groups that surprisingly took control of the local council six months ago.
For ANC stalwarts, the loss of Cape Town is more than an electoral setback. It is an insult, bordering on the intolerable.
The focus of the anger is mayor Helen Zille, a feisty former anti-apartheid activist who has earned the moniker "Godzille" for her confrontational - and some would argue incendiary - debating style. A Democratic Alliance MP, who presides over a fragile coalition, she has been labelled "racist" and "reactionary" by her political opponents. Some ANC supporters have even taken to jostling her at public meetings - throwing chairs at her in one episode that was subsequently condemned by President Thabo Mbeki.
Zille took such early forays on the chin but a fresh - and altogether more subtle - challenge to her authority has raised her ire, and with it the local political temperature, to boiling point.
The ANC-controlled provincial government of Western Cape, in which Cape Town falls, has announced plans to change the municipal structure, stripping Zille of her executive powers and handing them to an executive committee that would represent all the major political parties.
Local government and housing executive Richard Dyantyi said the proposed changes were aimed at creating "an inclusive government that works for all communities equally". Accusing Zille of neglecting her poorest citizens - something the mayor strenuously denies - Dyantyi also cited the "the need for stability" in the run-up to the country's hosting of the 2010 Fifa World Cup.
But Zille's party said the ANC was merely involved in a "Mugabe-style" power grab. It has also linked the timing to Zille's investigation of various corrupt practices and scandals associated with the prior administration.
The mayor herself noted the irony of the ANC looking to power-share in the one important constituency in the country where independents hold the majority (of just 51 per cent). In Pretoria, the ANC has 56 per cent of the vote but executive committees have never been mentioned there.
Of further embarrassment to the ANC is the fact that it insisted on retaining the executive mayoral system in 2002 when it held a slim majority while others were calling for a change.
Leading trade unions and the South African Communist Party argue that the move is bad for democracy. Senior ANC members have also privately expressed concern, pointing out that accepting defeat is the true test of political maturity.
While the Cabinet originally said it was a local rather than a national matter, a government minister has been drafted in to act as mediator next Wednesday.