In August 2016, Herman Mashaba was hoisted onto the shoulders of DA members in Joburg. He had a triumphant fist in the air, celebrating his nomination as mayor of SA’s economic capital, with the help of an unlikely ally — Julius Malema’s EFF. Back then the tongue-in-cheek analysis was that Jesus must have finally arrived in Joburg and Tshwane (among others), given Jacob Zuma’s infamous assertion in 2004 that "the ANC will rule SA until Jesus comes back".
Today, three years later, the realities of governing with a minority coalition have set in. Governing clearly isn’t an easy feat for the DA on the mean streets of Joburg, even if it campaigned vigorously back in 2016 on its success in running Cape Town.
Perhaps Joburg is just harder to fix: the streets in the wealthier northern suburbs are still riddled with potholes, bins on the sides of inner-city streets often bubble over onto the roads, and township residents in Alexandra make no bones about their dissatisfaction with service delivery.
Ahead of last week’s election, the DA must have been hoping for another dollop of divine intervention to allow it to grasp hold of Gauteng itself. It didn’t happen. Instead, remarkably, the ANC held on to its provincial majority by a razor-thin margin of one seat in the legislature. The ANC in Gauteng, led by David Makhura, won 50.19% of the province — down from 53.59% in its 2014 outcome.
Still, given the punishment the ANC received at the polls in that 2016 local election, when the party got just 45.8% of the vote, Makhura’s party might see last week’s slim victory as some sort of miraculous recovery. After all, it was in Gauteng in 2013 that Zuma’s populist message began to ring hollow, as the former president was roundly booed. It was an ominous message: sentiment towards Zuma soon soured across the country. And in 2014, the ANC’s support fell by almost 10 percentage points in Gauteng.
The DA will also need to analyse what went wrong in Gauteng this time. In 2016, with Mashaba ascendant, the DA scooped up 37.23% of support in Gauteng’s metros.
This was reversed last week. The DA dropped below 2014 levels, to just 27.45%. It is the stuff of nightmares for a party which hopes to consolidate its support in the metros in the 2021 local election.
The DA’s response has also been far from reassuring, hinting at arrogance. When DA chair Athol Trollip was asked by the Sunday Times this weekend if his party needed to do serious soul-searching, Trollip replied: "I think SA voters need to do some soul-searching." So what exactly pushed voters to change their votes?
The DA lost votes to the right, as the Freedom Front Plus gained 100,000 votes in Gauteng, a portion of which consisted of more conservative Afrikaner voters.
But this isn’t the whole story either. It may be that the state of governance in the metros of Tshwane and Joburg adversely affected the DA too. While the DA’s strong delivery programme after it first took Cape Town helped it win the province, there has been no evident and comparable improvement in the two Gauteng metros. And that could also have hurt the DA.
The ANC may have won back those who voted DA in 2016 — for which it can credit President Cyril Ramaphosa’s towering influence, as much as it could blame Zuma’s presence three years ago for the exodus.
At least a crucial outcome of the election, for those with an eye on the market, is that the ANC’s victory in Gauteng neutralises the prospect of the economically unhinged EFF playing a kingmaker role on a provincial level — like it did in Joburg and Tshwane.
At the same time, the electorate did not give the ANC an overwhelming majority.
Voters in Gauteng seem to know exactly what power their vote holds, and are willing to switch sides. It’s a great lesson for politicians on the downside of arrogance and inefficiency. Mashaba has only two years to learn this lesson, and begin delivering.
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