Coalition talks are a messy business. They are complex and deceptive; what is said in public is hardly a reflection of what is happening behind closed doors. Raising the possibility of an election rerun was a clever, albeit risky, move by President Cyril Ramaphosa to help his party gain some leverage after the main players declared it persona non grata. Strategies to extract the maximum benefit are always at play in coalition talks.
This was the case in 2016, when the EFF, for instance, held lengthy talks with the ANC but ended up agreeing to give key metros to the DA to punish the governing party for failing to yield to its demands — which included the departure of the then president Jacob Zuma. At the time, Zuma was unassailable in the ANC, despite the slow, steady — and suddenly rapid — decline in support the party suffered during his tenure.
As an aside, it is a bit rich for Zuma to call, as he did, for the party’s current leaders to be held to account for the ANC’s performance in the elections this month — when the degradation of SA cities and towns over the past decade happened under his watch. He and his prime minister, Atul Gupta, are to blame, but so is the ANC, for allowing them to act in its name.
His refusal to let go of the ANC is weighing it down and dragging it deeper into the abyss. A cursory glance at the election results shows that the Free State and KwaZulu-Natal, two provinces where his "radical economic transformation" faction remains active, recorded a dramatic drop in support. In Gauteng, Zuma protégé Mzwandile Masina, the mayor of Ekurhuleni, presided over a plunge of nearly 10 percentage points in support in the only metro in the province that the ANC retained in 2016.
Masina saw the writing on the wall some time ago — he has been a strong proponent of coalition politics recently and is said to favour partnering with the EFF. But once again Julius Malema’s party has set some onerous conditions for co-operating with the ANC.
Among them is the nationalisation of the SA Reserve Bank within 12 months — another issue Masina has long been arguing in favour of, even attending Bank meetings on behalf of foreign shareholders who want nationalisation so they can score hefty payouts. Other EFF demands are the cancellation of all student debt and for the ANC to vote with it on the expropriation of land without compensation.
While the EFF is without a doubt the ANC’s favoured option as a coalition partner, these demands, plus its insistence on being given complete control of one council, are likely to be deal-breakers. But any kind of partnership with the DA would hit Ramaphosa hard personally as he heads toward re-election next year and would play into the narrative that he is a puppet of "white monopoly capital". Despite the DA’s declaration that it will not work with the ANC, John Steenhuisen’s party is not entirely united on this score and we could still see tie-ups at local level.
ActionSA, too, has shunned the ANC, but it might change its mind in view of Ramaphosa’s declared readiness for election reruns in hung districts where no agreements are reached within the 14-day period provided for in law. The president told party members at a "thank you" rally this week that the ANC would prefer this to going into coalitions "at all costs".
This is a worst-case scenario for ActionSA, whose leader Herman Mashaba said it should be avoided "at all costs" — a rerun would be expensive and risky for a small, recently established party like his. There are also rumblings that ActionSA is not impressed with conditions set by the EFF for co-operation.
Ramaphosa’s rerun gambit might just be the right way to persuade smaller parties that a coalition with the ANC would not be so bad after all.
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