PETER BRUCE: Gayton McKenzie, ‘moonshot’ kingmaker?

The decision, if it holds, by Patriotic Alliance (PA) leader Gayton McKenzie to support a motion to remove the newly minted but hopelessly inappropriate Joburg mayor, Thapelo Amad, and its esurient and duplicitous speaker, Colleen Makhubele, may be a big moment in our politics.

Over the weekend the ANC was trying hard to persuade McKenzie not to pull out of the coalition the ANC and the EFF lead in Joburg. They depend on the PA to keep them there.

In the wings waits the city’s former coalition, led by the DA and including ActionSA, the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) and others, which was toppled this year after Makhubele crossed the floor, as it were; this triggered a series of no-confidence votes that now threaten to boomerang back to put her out of a salary.

Joburgers will have to thank ActionSA boss (and former DA mayor of the city) Herman Mashaba for having had the good sense to reach out to McKenzie and to ask him to support an ActionSA motion on Tuesday. It followed a gnawing sense of unease at Amad’s evident intellectual capacity for the job.

The ANC and EFF had pulled him out of a tiny sympathetic party, Al Jama-ah, and made him mayor after removing the DA’s Mpho Phalatse in January. In numerous TV appearances it became clear Amad was out of his depth, and an interview last week where he failed to explain in any detail the contents of a R9bn loan he was trying to raise and promote was the final straw. The ANC and the EFF are to blame, though.

But having gone along with them, the PA leader was himself embarrassed. “The Patriotic Alliance will vote in favour of ActionSA’s motion of no confidence against Joburg mayor Thapelo Amad,” he tweeted last Thursday. “We do this not for ourselves but because the residents deserve better. We voted for this man, which may be forgivable. To not remove him now would be unforgivable.”

He then briefly put himself forward as a candidate for mayor. That has gone away but the mere notion that McKenzie and his PA may be changing position on the South African political spectrum has started a sort of drumroll. Where will he take it? According to his friend and DA supporter, Rob Hersov, McKenzie is capitalist and free market in his outlook.

If that is correct, he should end up somewhere not too distant from the DA, the official opposition. Sadly, though, for both the DA and McKenzie, getting close to each other is complicated, if not impossible. McKenzie is a former gangster and spent seven years in Bloemfontein’s Grootvlei prison for armed robbery before, outraged at the gang-rape of a young inmate, he started secretly filming abuses and corruption in the prison. The politician who emerged is big, loud, rough, passionate and prickly, and with — for liberals at least — extremely difficult positions on migrants and law and order.

But they play well with the mainly coloured constituencies he has been able to gather around him, and as the DA has tried to keep its distance from him, figuratively holding its nose, he has drifted towards the ANC, which, he said a few weeks ago, “treats us like equals”. In the Western Cape’s sprawling Central Karoo district, he is the mayor, and the PA has been able to chip away a little at the DA in both Cape Town and Joburg.

The PA also enables an ANC administration in Knysna in the Western Cape, even though the DA is the largest party in the council. It holds the mayoral chain in Caledon in the Western Cape, by virtue of an arrangement with the ANC.

The PA won only 6,660 votes in the 2019 general election, 0.04% of the vote. But it took nearly 265,000 votes in the 2021 local government elections, or about 0.9% of the vote.

The DA is conflicted about McKenzie. Some people regard him as a buffoon, but he is also a real threat in the DA’s backyard, the Western Cape. The PA has disrupted the conventional wisdom which held that where coloured voters felt secure they would vote for the ANC and where they felt threatened by black African migration from the rest of the country into the Western Cape, they would vote DA.

That no longer applies in quite the way it once did. When DA leader John Steenhuisen sent invitations two weeks ago to party leaders to join him in talks to construct a political “moonshot pact” ahead of the elections next year, McKenzie was not invited.

The politician who emerged is big, loud, rough, passionate and prickly, and with — for liberals at least — extremely difficult positions on migrants and law and order

But Steenhuisen and McKenzie met, informally, last week, for dinner at the home of FF+ éminence grise Corné Mulder. There was horse-trading and McKenzie has made little secret of the fact that, by late last week, he and his party were on the move again. He was disenchanted with the ANC.

That could only be a good thing. He told Alec Hogg that all he expected of the DA, for him to join the “moonshot pact”, was that the DA support Herman Mashaba’s motion of no-confidence against Amad and Makhubele. That was setting a pretty low bar. The DA, surely, would be delighted to see the back of Amad?

What’s more, having sworn in February never to work with Helen Zille, McKenzie last week walked that back too. “It was childish,” he told Hogg last Wednesday. “I’ve also had to relook at my statement about how I don’t want to work with Helen Zille, which I think is childish. It was a childish statement. It’s not about individuals here. It’s about people’s lives. And I reflected on my statement and I just realised that I don’t have the right to tell the DA who they should send to meetings. The DA does not have the right to tell me they can’t work with anybody in the PA. So I think there was a foolish statement I made simply because Helen Zille is the leader of a party and everybody feels that she should represent them, I should respect them because it’s not about her and it’s not about me.”

And Steenhuisen was good now too — “pragmatic” and “a nice guy”.

McKenzie’s other condition for joining the pact is that all the parties do so as equals, which chimes with the FF+ people too. Just imagine if this were to work — the FF+, the DA, the IFP, ActionSA, the ACDP (it’ll cave) and the PA? It makes for a potentially heady mix ahead of next year.

And while it is still hard to see a combination of the ANC and the EFF scoring below 50% in a general election next year, who knows? A year is a long time and if the ANC-EFF alliance in Joburg is indeed to be collapsed by McKenzie walking over to the moonshot alliance, the fallout for other ANC-EFF local governments in Gauteng could be fatal.

But there’s a problem. Nothing is done until it is done. And even then.

Steenhuisen and McKenzie and Mulder may well have sat around a braai last week and chewed the fat. McKenzie would have made his demands, and insisted on DA support for Mashaba’s motion and the fact that they need to enter the moonshot flight deck as equals (by which he means the leaders of the parties to the pact jointly draw up the agreement).

And Steenhuisen may well have said to McKenzie that he would get back to him by Monday. That was two days ago.

The big thing is that it’s not Steenhuisen’s call. In the DA, coalitions are decided on by the federal council, with Zille at its head — and the world looks different from that table. For a start, the “moonshot pact” was supposed to be for parties opposed to the ANC. McKenzie’s PA is, one way or another, a partner with the ANC in several local governments around the country. Does it walk away from all of them for a seat at the moonshot table? Is it unreasonable for McKenzie to ask what he might get in return?

Second, there’s no easy escape from the issue of “sufficient consensus”, the convention used during the Codesa negotiations ahead of the first democratic elections. It meant that while there were lots of parties involved, everyone pretty much went along with whatever the ANC and the National Party agreed on.

It also means that expecting the DA to simply roll over and allow itself to become merely one among equals might be asking its federal council too much. The DA is vastly bigger than the minnows around it. “Asking the DA to stand aside for the leader of a party with less than 1% of the vote where we might have 25% is just not democratic,” a DA official tells me.

An even thornier issue — who the coalition would propose as head of state if it had the numbers in parliament at the first sitting after the election — is not even being discussed in the DA yet. It may well not be Steenhuisen, but many in the party bristle at the suggestion that the moonshot nominee would, as FF+ leader Pieter Groenewald suggested the other day, have to be black.

Why, they ask. In 2019 the DA, with Mmusi Maimane in the lead, attracted 96% of the white vote nationwide. If whites were that happy to vote for a black man, why would black South Africans not vote for a white man? Even though the answers might seem self-evident, they are hard to build principle on.

We need something new, but to get there will require vision, humility, firmness and fairness

—  Gayton McKenzie

Steenhuisen has, sensibly, given himself time — about two months — to encourage more opposition parties to get on board his Moonshot Express. There is Bantu Holomisa and the UDM to deal with. Holomisa has, for now, turned his back on the Steenhuisen proposition, but there is time to turn him. Former Business Day editor Songezo Zibi, whose new party, Rise Mzansi, launches this week, has spoken with Steenhuisen but thinks he is better off setting out on his own.

But getting McKenzie and the PA on board would be a really big deal if the leaders involved pull it off. That is only possible if the common ground Mashaba and possibly Steenhuisen feel they have found with McKenzie can be spread wider, particularly in the DA. McKenzie has thus far viewed politics in black and white — he either has power or he doesn’t, and he has vacillated between promises of office for too long. It may be time to settle, this time, for less.

By the beginning of this week, the hopes triggered last week had begun to fade a little. Perhaps the ANC had offered him, over the weekend, the mayoralty of Joburg? Would he try to use that as a bargaining chip with Steenhuisen? If he did it would merely confirm what too many people think they already know about the PA leader — that he is in it for himself.

It might be more useful, though, to give him the benefit of the doubt.

What seems to have happened is a raft of things fated to keep McKenzie at bay.

First, out of the blue, after he and Steenhuisen had met, Solly Msimanga, the DA leader in Gauteng, was quoted in an article in Daily Maverick saying of McKenzie’s intention to vote out Amad that it was only because “the EFF snubbed him in Ekurhuleni and he wants to punish them in Joburg. We are not foolish to believe that his roundabout turn is out of the goodness of his heart”.

McKenzie took that personally. For a start, he was waiting for a call from Steenhuisen by the time the article appeared. Second, acknowledging that his coalition positions have led to distrust in the DA, he had offered to support a first budget by the DA’s new mayor in Tshwane, Cilliers Brink. The budget failed because a DA councillor badly mishandled his holiday arrangements and was then excluded from the vote. But the PA’s lone Tshwane councillor kept his leader’s word and voted with the DA.

Then, on Tuesday, at a Joburg council programming meeting, the ACDP, uncharacteristically, perhaps deliberately, failed to turn up, meaning there was no quorum and that Mashaba’s motion of no confidence in the mayor and speaker could not be put in the diary. The ACDP is having a running battle with the DA suddenly, and quite aggressively turned down Steenhuisen’s invitation to join his pact.

And then there are still issues the DA has with McKenzie. His answer is that while he governs in some places with the ANC, he has also supported the DA, and, like the ACDP, does not want to be seen jumping to attention every time the DA leader enters a room. “They want you to drive in their car,” he says of the DA, “but they want you to pay for the ride.” The DA has still not officially indicated whether it will support Mashaba’s motion.

My view is that the DA, as the biggest party, has the most to lose by risking the moonshot in the first place. But it also risky to isolate McKenzie. He could make a real difference to what might otherwise be a grouping of the obvious in an election where citizens are desperate for change. But you have to sympathise with Steenhuisen and Zille — inside a pact or outside, McKenzie would be a handful and pretty much beyond the control of anyone. His signature on any pact document would need to be written in neon.

McKenzie last week wrote what we have to presume is, until future notice, his last word on the pact, and it is worth repeating here: “I have been closely following the watershed invite by the leader of the DA, John Steenhuisen. I call it a watershed because if successfully executed it will become spoken about for years to come and used by other countries as an example.

“I have observed a lot of criticism of the Moonshot Pact by other parties. The PA will take a wait-and-see approach. We will see if parties including our party, the PA, can truly put past differences, views and perceptions aside for the great South African dream. It’s a dream worth fighting for, because for most of the country has become a nightmare.

“Our party has been accused by many of keeping the ANC in power, while others have accused us of keeping the DA in power during the many times we voted for them to the detriment of the ANC.

“This is not a lecture, it is country duty. We have given the ANC nearly 30 years and we now have more than 18-million people on welfare.

“We need something new, but to get there will require vision, humility, firmness and fairness. Let’s see if John has what it takes to form part of such a vision. The PA shall join such a pact if we see a genuine change from what we have seen in the past and we will also genuinely make an effort to soften or alter some of our actions and attitudes that make others feel uncomfortable or distrusting of us.”

I think give this a few weeks. There is another Joburg council planning meeting on Friday. The ANC won’t pitch, but will the ACDP? Will there be a quorum and will the motion be placed on the programme? The vote would be held on April 25. That’s next Tuesday.