You turn your back for a moment and the place goes wild. I went on holiday and the DA was running the coalition government in Joburg. I come back and the ANC is. You can be certain that whatever slight progress mayor Mpho Phalatse had been making in our economic hub, it will now end.
Experience tells us a government of the ANC, the Patriotic Alliance (PA), COPE and whatever other odds and sods, supported by the EFF, and a R77bn budget make for just one outcome — and it won’t be pretty.
The governance of Joburg is important because the city is the first chance we have to show ourselves off to possible investors. Right now it is a disincentive. Mountains of investible money float around the world looking for agreeable places to settle, but Joburg makes a poor first impression and it has for years.
So there must have been some real hope after last year’s local government elections opened up the possibility of a Joburg not run by the ANC. After a detailed coalition agreement was hammered out and signed, Phalatse, a medical doctor, became mayor in November. She was poised and quietly determined, and set about trying to govern the city with an incredibly complicated coalition. Imagine holding a meeting, let alone reaching a decision, with the DA, ActionSA, the PA, the IFP, the African Christian Democratic Party, the Freedom Front Plus and COPE.
Yes, COPE. It doesn’t really exist as a party any longer and I doubt it’ll retain a seat in parliament after the 2024 elections. Started as an ANC breakaway after Jacob Zuma became ANC leader in 2007, its two leaders argued and split early and the remaining one was at a meeting just before I went away where I swear a whole fist-fight of party members happened right in front of him.
It was COPE councillor Colleen Makhubele who started the demise of the DA coalition in Joburg a few weeks ago when she supported a vote of no confidence in the council speaker, Vasco da Gama, a DA member, and proposed herself. She is now speaker. Before she became a councillor, she had another moment of fame — then communications minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, a wrecking ball who knows another when she sees one, appointed her chair of a new board at the SA Post Office in October 2019 after Mark Barnes resigned as CEO.
Her first job was to take out the management Barnes had left behind. Within a few weeks, a competent CEO, Lindiwe Kwele, and another senior manager had been suspended on spurious charges. An acting CEO was put in place. The board met dozens of times, quickly busting the meetings budget. A battle then occurred around the payment of social grants, which Barnes had wrestled from Cash Paymaster Services, and by mid-2020 Ndabeni-Abrahams had demoted Makhubele to ordinary board member.
Then Ndabeni-Abrahams disgraced herself during Covid and was eventually demoted by President Cyril Ramaphosa, to the small business development ministry, a place of absolute zero, or no molecular activity at all. Kwele was cleared of the charges against her but by this time the Post Office was truly screwed again. Makhubele subsequently popped up in COPE and has now helped put an ANC mayor in charge of the biggest metro in the country.
For beleaguered ratepayers it probably doesn’t matter much, in the short term, who runs the city. Water and electricity are sporadic, the roads rutted and the pavements filthy. It is all salvageable, but it will take a mighty effort for an extended period by a secure and cohesive local government. In the meantime, in Joburg and other metros where the DA just has a finger on power through complicated and twitchy coalitions, the fight for good governance is still in its tiny infancy.
It could take another local government election in 2026, and possibly the 2029 general elections, for a predictable and stable series of coalition shapes, involving either ANC or DA leadership, to begin to emerge. Smaller parties will become more substantial or fall away. But independent candidates, newly allowed by the Constitutional Court, will keep life complicated.
The key question left unanswered by the fracas in Joburg, though, is how it affects the DA, by some distance still the second-largest party in the country
Right now local politics looks like a schoolyard brawl at break time. Ultimately, this entire mess was initiated by COPE, but the PA has been typically vulgar in its manoeuvring. PA leader Gayton McKenzie has declared he’d kill your wife if you’re married to a Swazi or an Italian and a South African needs her hospital bed. So he would not have broken a sweat backing the ANC. The PA says it was “disrespected” by the DA. What a shock.
But the PA is not the only vampire in SA politics. To an extent, all parties are opportunist. The DA and ActionSA are at each other’s throats because they are family, just like the ANC and the EFF.
ActionSA has been extremely vocal, I see reading Twitter and the papers on my return. Its aim is clearly to grow at the DA’s expense, to suggest that the ousting of the DA mayor was the result of DA “arrogance”. That’s all fair game, but for now there’s not much evidence it is making headway.
The standout for me in all of this is Phalatse herself, her grace under pressure. She fought and lost. It must have been a bitter pill, but where she was invited to blame the DA leadership for supposedly refusing to allow her to concede to PA and ActionSA appeals to appoint an IFP nominee as speaker to replace Da Gama, she has replied simply that she was never told that by the DA leadership. The IFP itself has denied ever seeking the position.
Stirring the pot as much as it could, the ActionSA Twitter account said on Monday: “Former Mayor Mpho Phalatse pleaded with the DA’s National Leadership at the 11th hour to allow them to support an IFP Speaker, when it became clear that the PA would not support DA Speaker Alex Christians. The DA’s Leadership refused, which handed the govt to the ANC coalition.”
To which Phalatse replied: “That’s not what happened, and I never gave such a report. All local leaders agreed to speak to their parties about this. Before I made the call I was intercepted by IFP @mlungisi_baso saying his leadership had instructed them to withdraw their candidate and we should field ours.”
It is obvious that the DA and ActionSA, still in its infancy, will have to find a way of getting along. ActionSA will be disappointed that Phalatse has shown little sign so far of becoming the next black leader to leave the DA. Maybe she still will.
Meanwhile, where is the arrogance? Who was abused? All that has happened is that Makhubele and the PA gave Joburg back to the ANC. It’s politics in SA in 2021.
It won’t always be so. Politics everywhere is bitter and hateful. But in democracies power does change hands, often for a long time. It is going to happen in Britain, now run by arguably the weakest prime minister in its history, which takes some doing. Trying to sell an economic stimulus package that included £45bn of tax cuts, Liz Truss collapsed the currency and, but for the Bank of England, almost triggered a global financial accident. That’s arrogance, and, like Makhubela, she’ll soon be changing jobs again.
The key question left unanswered by the fracas in Joburg, though, is how it affects the DA, by some distance still the second-largest party in the country and if recent polls by a credible Victory Research are any guide, it is, if anything, modestly strengthening.
It’s not what its opponents and Twitter want it to be doing and it does have an uncanny ability to be dim. Party leader John Steenhuisen’s reference to a former wife as “roadkill” recently is a good example. Audio of the DA mayor of Tshwane trying to lecture officials to obey orders to procure, without a tender, a R26bn power deal for the city was simply excruciating to hear.
But if you listen to an interview former DA leader and current federal council chair Helen Zille gave to 702’s Clement Manyathela on Monday, what emerges is a plausible picture of a party trying to behave correctly, as per a signed coalition deal allocating positions between the coalition partners, in a situation of near chaos.
The standout for me in all of this is Phalatse herself, her grace under pressure. She fought and lost
That may be naive, but it isn’t arrogant. Zille’s proposition is that even had the DA been prepared to consider ActionSA and PA suggestions that it hand the speakership to the IFP, the IFP simply didn’t want it because the EFF was threatening to upset IFP-led coalitions in KwaZulu-Natal if it did. What was the DA supposed to do? Imagine Twitter’s response had Zille tried to compel the IFP to take the job?
One answer might be to not behave correctly. “A deal is a deal,” Steenhuisen said on the party YouTube channel. Indeed, in the pandemonium that is our politics, can some things not be sacred? Like your word, or your handshake?
I’m not sure. Politics is the art of the possible and what’s possible changes hourly sometimes. Politics is also about making promises to voters during elections and then not always keeping them. But if a deal’s a deal, why isn’t a promise a promise?
“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under,” wrote the American essayist HL Mencken nearly a century ago. “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
Perhaps Athol Trollip, former DA federal chair and now an ActionSA leader, got it most right on Wednesday when he tweeted: “The one good thing about all the coalition trials & tribulations we are going through is that we are trialing them & gaining invaluable experience. Learning who can be trusted, who can’t be & who are those that are for sale. We also need to learn to be more mature & altruistic.”
That’s pretty well said. Of all the former DA leaders now running ActionSA, he would be the most pained by the spectacle in Joburg. He was best man at Steenhuisen’s wedding not many years ago.
And as Trollip says, this is a learning period. For us onlookers, it is important to build a good deal of cynicism into our understanding of any SA party, the DA included. It is extremely well organised. A machine. I suspect the “arrogance” tag comes from people’s experience of Zille, who doesn’t hide her Teutonic impulses as a party manager. But it is a poor description of someone who is merely a little quick, arch and prim.
But there’s a rigidity about the DA that can’t all be Zille. It’s a structural thing. There are so many layers. Perhaps that’s necessary in a political party. God knows, the ANC has enough.
Sadly, machines don’t always work well in the thinking department. DA marketing seems unable to share the credit, for instance, that the party runs nearly 40 coalitions around the country only because of the support of other smaller parties. It is just toxic. The boasting adverts I sometimes see crowing about DA leadership in cities and metros where it owes leadership to other parties make me cringe.
The party is also deeply centralised — only Zille, as chair of the federal council, and two deputies negotiate coalitions — and policymaking is slow and cumbersome. One of the joys of watching UK television news is how ministers and shadow ministers speak for themselves without constant reference to the centre. That doesn’t happen in the DA. The leader speaks.
But a big arrogance test for the DA still lies ahead. It is this: after the 2024 elections or the 2029 elections the ANC will be unable to form a government on its own. Nonetheless, parliament will have to elect a president to form and run a government and (in my view) it is impossible for a white citizen to be the next president of SA. Or the next.
But if the DA vote could give a coalition a majority, even if it were the biggest party in it, would it support the election of a non-DA head of state? ActionSA’s Herman Mashaba? Mmusi Maimane the independent? If I were Phalatse, I’d hang in there.
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