CAPE TOWN'S WHITE MAYOR GOES TO WAR ON DRUG KINGPINS

Helen Zille, the white mayor of Cape Town trying to make the
opposition relevant in the new South Africa, will take her campaign
to root out drug dealers back to the streets today, a week after she
was arrested over her participation in another protest.

Zille's Democratic Alliance says today's march in the poor community
of Atlantis, outside Cape Town, has police permission but under the
same tight conditions that she and a dozen other activists were
accused of breaching last weekend in the crime-ridden township of
Mitchells Plain. She will appear in court on 26 October.

Cape Town has become a playground and investment magnet for the
global rich who are seduced by its stunning scenery, fine wines and
golfing estates. To outsiders it can appear like another country,
where wealthy whites congregate and many middle-class black South
Africans say they feel ill at ease.

But the surrounding Western Cape has the biggest drug problem of
South Africa's nine provinces, recording 40 per cent of the nation's
100,000 drugs-related crimes over the past year.

The Cape's mixed-race ethnic group, known as Coloureds, are worst
affected by the roaring trade in narcotics. Methamphetamine is said
to be causing the fastest addiction rates ever seen in the townships.
Local people accuse police of failing to arrest known dealers and
have recruited the mayor and her supporters to join their protests.
Police say Zille and community leaders went too far last Sunday,
knocking at the door of an alleged drug kingpin.

In a weekly newsletter last Friday Zille denied any trespass or
vigilantism. Instead, she accused the ruling African National
Congress (ANC) of appointing its cadres to top jobs in the police and
other government agencies with orders to prevent the opposition from
gaining support among poor communities.

'In its hunger for total power, the ANC is determined to control all
community-based initiatives, including the fight against drugs,' she
wrote. For the ANC, Cape Town is the one that got away. Zille became
mayor in 2006 after months of horse-trading when representatives of
Coloured voters, the largest population group, threw their weight
behind the Democratic Alliance (DA) instead of the ANC. But the
ruling party, which won an awesome 70 per cent of the national vote
in the 2004 general elections, still controls the Western Cape
province and 56-year-old Zille has had to survive repeated attempts
to unseat her.

In May this year Zille easily won the contest to become leader of the
Democratic Alliance and thus of the official opposition in the
National Assembly where, with just 12 per cent of the seats, her
party is the second-largest.

'Our objective is to keep the opposition alive and hopefully to build
for the future,' Zille told The Observer last Friday. 'The ANC is a
massive party.'