Saving South Africa: Lessons from the uMngeni Municipality Success Story

By Chris Pappas and Sandile Mnikathi

The Democratic Alliance won control of the uMngeni Municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands after the local government elections in 2021. As the only DA-run municipality in KZN, uMngeni provides a template for how local government could work in a post-ANC South Africa. Written by two leaders at the very heart of the project, Saving South Africa reveals the challenges, the triumphs and disasters the new administration has encountered along the way.

It is an eye-opening exposé of how cadre deployment has helped to bring the country to its knees. It is a story of incompetent officials, political spies, gun-wielding tenderpreneurs, petty theft and grand larceny. And yet, as we follow the authors on their journey, there is always hope for a better future as the corrupt layers of local governance are gradually stripped away, revealing the responsive and caring civil service envisioned by the South African Constitution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Release date: Apr 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9781770109193

Book preview

Part 1

Who We Are

Chapter 1

Chris Pappas

Chris Pappas is not your average twenty-first-century politician. He is short, skinny, bespectacled, ginger haired and pale skinned. He is 32 years old, has a degree in Regional and Town Planning from the University of Pretoria, speaks fluent isiZulu and he is gay. Pappas grew up on Highover Farm, about 15 kilometres from the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands town of Mooi River. His mother, Jackie, is an enthusiastic horsewoman, a prominent showing judge and a taker in of injured wildlife. His father, Mike, is a retired racehorse trainer and animal nutritionist, who now spends his time experimenting with recipes for animal feed. Jackie and Mike met at a Christmas party in Durban and only later discovered that they were neighbours, living on farms in the same valley.

‘Mike and I were together for a long time before we got married,’ said Jackie. ‘I think Chris was six when we tied the knot, and we got married because it became too complicated for the kids to explain to the people at Treverton School why we were not married.’

Jackie’s maiden name is Meyer, which is German. Her great-grandfather was born in Germany and went to live in Kenya. There is a family story that one brother fought on the German side in the Second World War and the other brother fought for the Allies, and both died in battle in the same area. Jackie’s grandfather married into the Fields family, after which Fields Hill is named.

‘My father was born in Kloof, and I grew up in the Fields Hill Hotel until the family moved to Mooi River. I lived at Dalruskin Farm, and so I know this area better than Mike. Most of this valley was owned by the Hamilton-Brown family, and eventually they sold a few farms and my family bought one of them.

‘After school I went to work for Winks Green. I had ridden horses and ponies as a child, but it was never something that I took seriously. I did not know what I wanted to do, so I just kind of fell into it. I moved away to work, and while I was gone Mike’s dad bought Highover Farm and turned a perfectly good dairy farm into a horse stud.’

Mike’s grandfather was born in Greece and immigrated to South Africa. He died before Mike was born. His father, Nestor Pappas, was born in Pretoria. Nestor married and bought a hotel in Nelspruit. The family moved there, and Nestor started a dry-cleaning business, followed by a stone-crushing business. He crushed rock for the roads in what was then the Eastern Transvaal and made some money, which he invested in real estate. He bought a farm called Highover, and several others, until he had built up quite an empire. Mike was born in Nelspruit, the youngest of five children.

‘My uncle’s kids were the Pappas brothers, who all became professional golfers. The Greek Embassy got hold of them and gave them Greek passports. They played for Greece in the Junior World Cup of Golf and then also in the Senior World Cup. I was closest in age to Craigen Pappas, who is now the head professional at the Heritage Golf Club in Dallas, Texas,’ said Mike.

‘I went to primary school in Nelspruit and in senior school I was a boarder at Hilton College. My mum usually brought me back to Hilton from Nelspruit, but when my dad came with, we drove through Mooi River, and he always said he wanted to buy a farm there to do horses. My dad was also a bookmaker. When I finished school, I went to the University of Pretoria (Tuks) to study animal science, and Chris followed me to Hilton and Tuks.

‘I started working with horses in Randtjesfontein while I was at Tuks. A friend of my dad’s had a piece of ground there, and so we put up a house and a few stables and I started doing the horses. And then this farm in Mooi River came up for sale, and we came down and bought it on an auction for about R800 000. It was 1983, and we called it Highover after the farm my dad grew up on. There are about 100 hectares of arable land that we plant, 40 hectares of maize, pasture, a bit of soya and the rest is veld. We’ve got a herd of about 100 Angus and Bonsmara beef cattle.

‘For a few years we had a horse food and dog food business here. I sold it before lockdown, but I still act as an adviser, and I’m still mixing some food here. These days I’m experimenting with extrusion, that is the cooking process used in dog food and other animal feeds. You take a waste product and turn it into something good. I’m trying white beans at the moment; they are not good raw, but once cooked, it’s very good food, high in protein and carbohydrates.’

Chris was born in 1991. Jackie said, ‘He cried for the first two years of his life. We had an old Mercedes that we used to drive around the farm at night to try to get him to go to sleep. The bumps used to soothe him. We would come back to the house, and he would wake up and scream again. I took him to a paediatrician once a week, and I would say this child has to have an ear infection, or he has a brain problem; something has to be wrong with this child.

‘I was drinking tea one day and had just put milk in, and I kissed him on the cheek and this nasty red wheal came up straight away. It turned out he had a milk allergy. He got over the crying quickly after figuring that out, but to this day he doesn’t eat chocolate or ice cream and it’s not because he has an allergic reaction to either, I think it’s just his system remembering what it was like when he was little.

‘After that he was fine, sensible, good. Beautiful manners around people, quick to walk and talk. The farm was isolated, and he grew up with our housekeeper’s child, Bongani Maxwell Mthalane, and that’s where he learnt to speak isiZulu. Maxwell is two years older, and they’re still great mates today. Chris was always tiny and that’s where his nickname came from: Gundi. The isiZulu word for mouse is igundane and we call him Gundi, or Guun for short. Never Chris. Very occasionally, Christopher.

‘When he was little, he was quite good at playing by himself. He and Maxwell used to have an area by the water reservoir where they would make dams and play with plastic animals. One day they were up there, and it had gone quiet, so I thought I better take a look at what the kids were doing. They had made tiny snares out of grass and caught a whole load of shrews. They had cut them in half and were braaiing them and eating them. I took one look and thought, no, I don’t want to know, and I walked away.’

Chris remembers those days very well. ‘We used to go into the veld and take our catties and shoot little field mice, the striped ones. It was always funny because some of the black children would say, You can’t touch those things when they’re alive because they have electricity. Those stripes on the back have electricity, but you could touch them when they were dead. So, we hunted them with little traps and shot them with catties, and then we had to eat them! We were taught that you do not kill anything unless it is to eat it or if it is suffering.

‘I used to love to build things. There were tree houses and forts, and I used to empty the reservoir in an attempt to build bigger and bigger dams. Our house is quite high up on the hill and there’s a reservoir above it, with a track between the two that acted perfectly as a river when the water was running out of the reservoir. I used to make dams and build the walls up, bigger and bigger, and build overflows and sluice gates and things like that. I’d get distracted like kids do and I’d leave the tap running to fill my dam and then go do something else. I’d come back many hours later, and my dam would be full and overflowing. The tank, which also feeds water to the main house and half the farm, would be empty, which meant we wouldn’t have water at night. And because it was also the highest tank on the farm, the pump would continuously draw water from the bottom of the farm and none of the horses would get water. I remember getting into trouble for that. It drove my mother crazy.’

Jackie tried her best to push Chris into horse riding. She said, ‘He decided very young that riding wasn’t his thing even though he rode beautifully. He retired from show riding early on and took up polocrosse. He liked the camaraderie of being in a team. He also fancied being a polocrosse umpire. He was always good with the horses, almost as if he had some sort of agreement with them. So, if I was doing a show, I would tell him to come and lead a horse. He would complain, but I would find some old-fashioned clothes for him, and he would lead the horse around the ring like he was born to it.’

Meanwhile, Mike had stumbled into a successful breeding programme for his racehorses. He had started training his own horses because it was too expensive to send them to a trainer. ‘We just bred, trained and raced,’ he said. ‘We used to sell stock for whatever people offered and the rubbish we would keep and train, but we kept on trying and did better out of the rubbish than the ones we sold.

‘My most successful horse was Bound to Hound. I put her in a feature race first start at Greyville in 1985. She came out and won. There was a big article in the paper that the pick 6 was just a lottery, because how could anyone choose an unraced horse? I think they subsequently changed that rule, so that you couldn’t put a first-timer in a pick 6 race.

‘But, anyway, it was fun. On race day, you would get to the office, and they would give you your transport subsidy and lunch tickets, and if you had owners with you, they would get lunch tickets. You would have a lovely day of it. I remember going to Clairwood, with the old ice-cream lorry, which was a square box truck, with five horses in it and we had four wins and a second. And the second was nearly first; it was called first and then beaten out in a photo review.

‘When Gold Circle took over management, that’s when the fun stopped. A lot of the subsidies fell away, and it was no longer profitable. If you’re not enjoying it and it’s not profitable, why do it? We just stopped.’

When Chris was old enough, he went to Treverton School in Mooi River. Mike had started a business with his brother, selling light aircraft. He said, ‘Chris was supposed to be playing cricket at Treverton one Saturday and we had run out of time to get there by road, so we flew in the microlite to Treverton’s airstrip. During the day, the wind got up and when it was time to go home it was a bit hairy. But I thought, well we’re stuck if I don’t take off. So off we went. It was blowing so hard that we couldn’t land in the normal place on the farm, and I had to put it down on the road outside the main house.

‘The following weekend we were due to fly up the North Coast to watch the turtles come ashore and Chris just said no, he wasn’t getting back on that little plane. And he’s still like that. His sister is like me; she has a pilot’s licence.’

Chris’s sister, Elizabeth, has been known as ‘Bit’ since she was young because, unlike Chris, she inherited the horse gene from her mother. Jackie explained: ‘In those days, the Mooi River area was a real hub for horses. Between Mooi River and here, you had Summerhill Stud, Hartford House, Somerset Stud, Avalon, Ellis and us (Highover Stud). Today they are all gone. I stole some of Mike’s thoroughbred mares, and I put them to my Welsh Pony stallions. When Elizabeth was old enough to ride, I couldn’t find a pony for her that I liked, so I bred one for her. I used to drive out of here every Friday afternoon to get to a show. She made provincial colours three years in a row in all five disciplines.’

Chris was fonder of the cows than the horses. He said, ‘One of my most vivid memories is having an argument with my mother about whether or not I could go with the cattle herdsmen to take the cows to market. I wanted her to pick me up on the way because I wasn’t going to make it in time for school. We would start at 4 am and wherever I ended up, she would need to pick me up and take me on to school. I ended up walking to school smelling like cattle dung because that is what happens when you walk behind cows for three hours. I wasn’t the most popular person to sit next to in class that day.’

He also got banned from riding the quad bike. ‘Maxwell and I were riding the quad bike around my mum’s garden; he was driving, and I was on the back. I don’t know what he did, but he overreacted, and I fell off the back. He just carried on and the bike ended up in the bushes on its side. We got banned from riding the quad in the garden after that.’

As he got older, though, he spent less time in the garden and more time in front of the computer. ‘I had a computer game called SimCity where you build cities and towns on a simulator. That’s probably why I enjoy what I do so much and also why I get so frustrated about why things can’t move quickly. Life is not like a computer game where you can press the x3 speed button, and everything goes into super-fast-forward. I’d spend hours and hours building towns and cities and managing the problems.

‘It would pop up scenarios like the power plant has blown up, and now your city’s got no power. What do you do? You would have to balance the loans and understand why some people were unhappy because I’ve got a park in one area and not others. Some would be unhappy because the industrial area is too close to them, and so on. The game got very complicated but started off quite basic. I think there’s still a version of it today, but it’s very, very complicated now with all the new AI and simulator technology. SimCity is the reason why I decided to do town planning as one of my options when I went to Tuks.’

After Treverton, Chris moved to Mike’s old school, Hilton College, about an hour’s drive towards Durban from Highover Farm. He participated fully in school life, playing rugby, soccer and hockey, rowing, joining the debating society and singing in the school choir. ‘He was very busy at Hilton,’ said Mike. ‘He played everything. He was in Churchill House, the same as me, and he used to play rugby. He wasn’t good at it, but he tried, and he was actually part of the first rugby team, but as the main medic.’

Chris remembers how hectic life could be at Hilton. He said, ‘I would finish my rugby match