In the 2021 municipal elections, the DA could lose the Gauteng metro councils it won in 2016, say political analysts. This comes after it was plunged into crisis by the shock resignation of its top leaders.
The party’s running of the capital, Tshwane, and SA’s economic hub, Joburg, has been chaotic and controversial, and observers say its decision to get into bed with the EFF to clinch power in these metros has damaged its brand.
Whether its leadership upheaval will also affect its hold on Cape Town, which it won with a firm majority in 2011, remains to be seen.
The DA lost support for the first time in the May 8 general elections when it scored 20.77% of the vote, a drop of 1.5 percentage points from 2014, which cut its tally of MPs by five to 84.
It has been accused of presiding over dodgy tender deals in Joburg and Tshwane. Solly Msimanga resigned as the party’s mayor of Tshwane in January, allegedly due to unsatisfactory performance and a series of scandals, including the multibillion-rand GladAfrica controversy and the hiring of unqualified staffers in his office.
GladAfrica was appointed in 2017 to assist the city with the roll-out of infrastructure projects valued at R12bn. The contract was, however, open-ended and resulted in R318m in irregular expenditure in financial 2018.
In Joburg, which has the biggest budget of SA’s six metros (R64.5bn), the DA was slammed for awarding a R1.2bn contract to fleet manager Afrirent in November 2018. The metro used a regulation 32 process, which allowed Afrirent to win the contract without a competitive tender process because it already had supplier status with another state institution, according to reports. Earlier this year the city instituted a forensic investigation after reports of possible political influence in the awarding of the tender. The investigation cleared Afrirent CEO Senzo Tsabedze of any wrongdoing, but Afrirent was later exposed as having paid R500,000 to a company linked to EFF leader Julius Malema.
This week the DA faced its biggest test following the exodus of high-ranking leaders peeved by Helen Zille’s election to the powerful position of federal council chair. First to quit was Joburg mayor Herman Mashaba, quickly followed by party leader Mmusi Maimane and his key ally, former federal chair Athol Trollip. Maimane said he no longer believed the party was the vehicle to take his vision for the country forward.
Amanda Gouws, a political analyst at Stellenbosch University, says the DA is in a shambles. "In the upcoming local government elections, the DA is going to lose all the metros it won in the previous municipal election. It underestimated what bringing Helen Zille back would do to the party … They were thinking about their white voters but now they are going to lose both their black supporters and progressive white supporters. I don’t see them coming back from this."
Unisa political analyst Professor Lesiba Teffo says it’s clear "the hardcore liberals, those who think they own [the DA] … must have crossed the Rubicon" and decided that retaining the metros is not important.
These "hardcore liberals" give priority to maintaining what they regard as the "authentic core values and brand of the DA", Teffo says.
"There was a time when the DA were serious contenders for state power, but I think they have made peace with that, and said: ‘If the blacks have to go, so be it; we don’t care about state power anymore, as long as we can make our constituency happy.’"
University of Free State political analyst Joleen Steyn Kotze says the turmoil makes it difficult to maintain its electoral base or increase support in the metros it has governed since 2016. Kotze, a research specialist in democracy at the Human Sciences Research Council, says the DA seems to be struggling with its political identity. She is waiting to see to what extent "the DA is going to sustain its supporter base across racial lines and what identity it is going to build to sustain and increase its electoral support" in the 2021 elections.
Political analyst Ralph Mathekga traces the DA’s current challenges to its decision to enter coalitions with parties such as the EFF — arrangements whose aims it never explained to its constituency and that have compromised the DA’s image as an anticorruption party. "The corruption allegations [in DA metros] are a serious problem, no doubt, and have rattled some of their core constituencies," Mathekga says.
Unperturbed, DA national spokesperson Solly Malatsi says the party believes it has enough time to recover lost ground. "It’s for this reason the federal council resolved there will be an early congress, in April 2020, to elect new leadership."
Ahead of that, the party will hold a policy conference "to repackage our policy offering to kick-start the campaign for 2021 local government elections as early as possible".
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