* The views expressed in this reader’s letter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial position of the newspaper. The publication of this letter is intended to encourage public debate on matters of local interest.
Suliman Rajah writes:
The DA’s demerger drive is not about service delivery – it is about restoring minority power.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) wants you to believe that dissolving the JB Marks Local Municipality and returning to separate Tlokwe (Potchefstroom) and Ventersdorp municipalities is a technical fix for collapsing services.
The newspaper article uncritically repeats this claim, presenting the DA as a concerned opposition simply seeking administrative justice. That is a fiction. Here is the truth.
- The merger did not cause the crisis – neoliberalism did.
The DA blames the 2015 merger for “years of declining service delivery.” Yet municipal decay is national, not local. It is the direct result of GEAR-era austerity, unfunded mandates, cost-recovery models, and the systematic underfunding of local government – all policies the DA actively supports. Reducing a structural crisis to a boundary dispute is not analysis. It is propaganda.
Read the DA’s response to the letter here
2. The demerger is an electoral gerrymander – and the FF+ factor exposes it.
Before the merger, Ventersdorp was a distressed municipality. Its tax base had been eroded because white-owned commercial farms were systematically under-taxed or not taxed at all. The merger brought those farms into the JB Marks tax base – not perfectly, but in principle. That is what the DA cannot accept. Here is the dimension the newspaper will not tell you: Ventersdorp’s white farmers are not DA voters. They vote largely for the Freedom Front Plus (FF+). So the merger did not just dilute the DA’s numbers by adding Black voters from Ventersdorp’s townships – it also added white farmers who vote for a rival right-wing party. The DA is now trapped in a municipality where neither the Black majority nor the farming minority supports them.
The DA’s solution is ruthless but logical: split the municipality.
– Keep Potchefstroom (smaller, whiter, wealthier) – where the DA wins.
– Abandon Ventersdorp (poor, Black townships + FF+-voting white farmers) – to fail on its own. The DA has no interest in Ventersdorp’s Black residents. And they certainly have no interest in handing more votes to the FF+. Demerger allows them to surgically remove both the Black majority and the rival white farming vote from their electoral calculus. That is not administrative reform. That is a racial and partisan gerrymander of the highest order.
3. The DA’s silence on white-owned land is deafening
The newspaper article does not mention that the vast majority of land in both Potchefstroom and Ventersdorp remains in white ownership. Black townships – Ikageng, Mohadin, Promosa in Potchefstroom, and Tshing in Ventersdorp – are squeezed into tiny, under-serviced pockets. White-owned farms and gated estates like Lekwena occupy the rest, contributing little to the municipal fiscus. The DA has never proposed progressive property taxation on these estates or farms. Instead, it demands secession – so that white areas no longer have to cross-subsidise Black townships. That is not good governance. That is apartheid spatial planning restored through the back door.
4. No opposition does not mean no legitimacy
The article boasts that “no party has come forward to oppose” the DA’s court application. But in a context where the ANC is fractured, the EFF is overstretched, the FF+ benefits from the current merger’s discomfort for the DA, and civil society lacks legal resources – the absence of formal opposition reflects unequal access to the courts, not democratic consent. The DA’s proximity to expensive lawyers and its willingness to litigate every political loss is procedural bullying, not proof of a righteous case.
5. The DA governed JB Marks before – and failed
The DA held power in the predecessor municipality for six months about a decade ago. During that time, it approved many of the unlawful, exclusionary developments – including gated estates – that it now claims to critique.
The party is not fighting for better services. It is fighting to regain control of a smaller, whiter, wealthier Potchefstroom where its minority power is secure and where it no longer has to compete with the FF+ for white farming votes.
6. The courts are not the answer – democracy and redistribution are
The DA rushes to the Pretoria High Court because it knows litigation favours those with resources. But real solutions to JB Marks’ crisis are political and economic, not legal:
- Progressive land value taxation on white-owned farms and gated estates.
- Binding public participation that cannot be ignored by the Municipal Demarcation Board.
- An end to fiscal austerity and the restoration of pro-poor local government grants.
- Integrated, de-racialised spatial planning – not secession. The DA still believes in two towns – and the FF+ is just collateral damage
The newspaper article presents the DA as a reasonable opposition seeking legal clarity. In truth, the DA is pursuing a political project: to restore a pre-merger electoral map where they do not have to share a municipality with either Black working-class voters or FF+-voting white farmers.
The FF+ factor proves the point. This is not about service delivery. If it were, the DA would welcome the farming vote – whatever its party affiliation – as part of a broader tax base to fund services for all. Instead, they want to eject those farmers (and their Black neighbours) from the DA’s preferred jurisdiction. The merger was flawed and top-down.
But reversing it without addressing land ownership, racialised taxation, and the deliberate underfunding of Black townships will not fix a single leaking pipe. It will only deepen the divide – one municipality for white DA-voting Potchefstroom, another for Ventersdorp’s Black townships and FF+ farmers to fight over. That is not service delivery.
That is abandonment dressed as a court application. Progressives must oppose the demerger. The fight is not to split JB Marks. The fight is to fund it, integrate it, and force white-owned land and capital – whether they vote DA or FF+ – to finally pay their fair share.
