How Malema handed power to the DA

The EFF played a surprising hand in a high-stakes political game this week, when it effectively handed power to the DA in key Gauteng metros — a move that’s expected to have far-reaching consequences ahead of the 2024 polls.

By the end of this week, the ANC will pretty much have lost the country’s main economic centres. Joburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni, and eThekwini in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), all look set to be added to opposition-controlled Cape Town.

Psychological ramifications aside, it means the ruling party will have no control over five major cities with a combined budget of about R215bn. That’s no small matter, and it’s likely to loosen the party’s already slipping grip on power nationally.

After losing the metros of Joburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay to coalitions in the 2016 polls — and, with that, its access to lines of patronage, nepotism and party funding — the ANC failed to muster a strong enough bid to retake them outright.

It’s managed to cobble together a coalition to control Nelson Mandela Bay. But it’s lost ground elsewhere.

In Gauteng, its support has plunged dramatically in Ekurhuleni, a former stronghold. With the election of the DA’s Tania Campbell, that metrot now has its first woman mayor.

In Joburg, too, there’s a woman in the mayor’s office for the first time: the DA’s Mpho Phalatse. And in Tshwane, Randall Williams was on Tuesday elected by an opposition coalition that did not require EFF support.

After a falling out with the IFP, the ANC’s control over KZN is looking shaky too.

On Tuesday, the IFP took control of the economically strategic municipality of uMhlathuze, which includes Richards Bay.

And at the time of going to print, the opposition’s claim to eThekwini looked to be a near certainty, after the IFP turned its back on a deal it struck with the ANC last week. In fact, the party turned away from the ANC in nearly all hung councils on Monday and Tuesday.

With so many main metros out of its hands, the ANC will find it difficult to recover. Barring a miracle between now and the 2024 elections — a near impossibility, given how the gloss of Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency has faded — the party has all but lost Gauteng and KZN.

How did the 109-year-old former liberation movement get here?

When Julius Malema and the EFF announced a "voting deal" with the DA on a windy August morning after the local government elections in 2016, the EFF leader said: "We will vote for the opposition because the ANC must be removed from power and this is the start of removing the ANC from power.

Barring a miracle between now and the 2024 elections — a near impossibility, given how the gloss of Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency has faded — the ANC has all but lost Gauteng and KZN

"We can’t be neutral. If we are neutral, we are sellouts, we are cowards, it means we don’t want to take a stand. We have taken a stand and we are going to vote for the opposition."

Though the EFF has switched position on a number of matters and been accused of "flip-flopping", it has been nothing but consistent on this score: it wants to remove the ANC from power. Even its flirtation with the ANC’s radical economic transformation (RET) faction has been rooted in this clear, unambiguous goal.

Last week the EFF announced its talks with the ANC on forming a coalition in the metros had failed, and that it would not enter any agreement with any party, but will sit in the opposition benches.

It also vowed that it would make any metros the ANC does take "ungovernable", after the ANC failed to meet its ambitious demands for partnership, including the cancellation of student debt, the nationalisation of the Reserve Bank and the expropriation of land without compensation within strict timeframes.

The EFF could not have been surprised at the failure of the talks — after all, it placed almost the exact same demands on the table in 2016 and was rejected. If the ANC didn’t buckle in 2016, there was no reason to think it would do so now, when Ramaphosa’s main coalition message was: "Not at all costs."

The ANC for its part wasn’t hugely surprised by Monday’s outcome. It knew it needed the EFF to take power in the Gauteng councils. Once Malema withdrew his support, the ANC top brass would have known the game was over.

With the ANC out of the picture, it was left to opposition parties to form administrations — no easy task, given that the DA refused to work with the EFF after it was burnt by its last foray into co-operation with the firebrand party.

Meetings between ActionSA and the EFF between Friday and Monday morning resulted in a plan that entailed "taking what the ANC wanted" and "giving the DA what it did not want", a source who was party to the talks tells the FM. This meant voting for an opposition candidate to take the metros out of the ANC’s hands, but also voting for the DA despite its insistence that it wouldn’t work with the EFF.

After the election of DA mayors in Joburg and Ekurhuleni, party leader John Steenhuisen said the DA’s focus would be on "solidifying coalitions with parties that share our governing principles and our commitment to the people".

That means it may, at a minimum, have to enter into talks with the EFF — something it has so far refused to do.

DA federal council chair Helen Zille is under no illusion about the party’s pyrrhic victory. "Where we find ourselves running minority governments, it will be devilishly difficult … Every council meeting could be a nightmare, where we battle to pass budgets, bills and take decisions in order to do the work required," she wrote on social media.

"We will inherit officials steeped in ANC culture, who control the administration, and are answerable elsewhere.

"We will face a raft of tenderpreneurs, fighting hard to stay on the gravy train. In many places we will be undermined by a hostile province under a different administration."

And the party cannot be expecting the EFF to make things easy. Malema, in that memorable 2016 media briefing, had this to say about the DA: "The DA must know that us voting with them does not mean that we are in bed together with them, they are the better devil compared to the ANC."

What are the implications of these events for the ANC internally?

It will certainly have made things uncomfortable for a dozy Ramaphosa — and the EFF knows this.

This election has broken the notion that the ANC’s electoral bloodbath would be halted under Ramaphosa. He will now be under pressure to hasten reforms in the ANC internally, even though he doesn’t appear to have the spine to effect them.

His government, too, will have to start delivering. So far, his cabinet has been weak and ineffectual, and Ramaphosa himself has come across as a boring bureaucrat with no new ideas. He’s locked into loyalties to retain his tenuous grip on power; no radical reformer, he is a leader married to process.

Ramaphosa’s opponents will no doubt use the loss of the key metros against him ahead of the ANC’s elective conference in December 2022 — though this is unlikely to prevent him from serving a second term at the helm of the party.

The loss of eThekwini and Ekurhuleni could in fact do more harm to Ramaphosa’s opponents within the party than it does to him.

Outgoing Ekurhuleni mayor Mzwandile Masina, along with Gauteng MEC for local government Lebogang Maile, have their eyes on Gauteng, where staunch Ramaphosa backer David Makhura’s second and final term as premier comes to an end in 2024.

Masina’s faction — which includes Maile — will have been weakened after he lost mayoral office. Since his defeat this week, he’s opted to retain a council seat in the metro.

Meanwhile, in KZN, the ANC on Monday disrupted the sitting to elect a new Durban mayor after it realised the IFP would no longer support its candidate, Mxolisi Kaunda.

Kaunda, an RET figure in the province, is at the heart of the broken voting pact between the ANC and the IFP in KZN. The IFP didn’t want the ANC to field him as a candidate for the mayorship, but a special ANC national executive committee meeting on Sunday overruled the coalition negotiations and took the decision that Kaunda would be the party’s candidate. As a result, the local IFP backed out of its deal with the ANC, going against the wishes of the party’s national leaders.

The Durban vote — due to take place on Wednesday, after the FM’s print deadline — looks set to follow the same pattern as the metros in Gauteng, with the opposition taking the mayor and deputy mayor posts.

According to insiders in eThekwini, the ANC’s Thabani Nyawose was elected speaker in the metro after the IFP missed the council meeting on Monday, while awaiting instructions from party bosses.

What does this all mean for citizens?

Messy coalitions, instability and potentially even worse service delivery, as new administrations come to grips with the new political realities they face. That is, unless opposition parties can cobble together a pact to put the people first.

Amid the disruption, there is an opportunity for the opposition to weaken the ANC in a way it has not been weakened before — to show that political parties can set their differences aside and put the people first. It’s something the ANC has not done in more than a decade.

In this there is hope — but it’s an outcome that will take a maturity not yet witnessed in SA’s political landscape.