Our national soap opera, also known as coalition talks, continued in earnest this week — with an interesting entity taking centre stage, a 0.97% political party called the Patriotic Alliance (PA).
It is led by one Gayton McKenzie, ex-convict, self-proclaimed coloured nationalist, author of the critically acclaimed Kill Zuma by Any Means Necessary and once likened to the Guptas in terms of influence on the convict-in-chief and former president Jacob Zuma.
(Zuma as it happens, was admitted to hospital this week, a relapse brought on by the pending court cases related to his — probably unlawful — medical parole.)
The PA was part of a coalition with the ANC in the City of Joburg, but the governing party terminated that coalition in November last year, after three ANC-aligned managers were suspended over allegations of corruption around personal protective equipment contracts.
Now McKenzie has announced a "historic" coalition deal with the ANC.
The PA won 75 seats in the 2021 local government elections, off the back of the rising tide of nationalist politics among SA’s communities. It obtained about 226,000 votes nationally with its focus on coloured voters. Yet its demands to go into a coalition deal with the ANC was that it get not one but eight mayoral seats across SA and full control of at least one council in the Northern Cape. The ANC agreed and voters were fed to the wolves by the governing party once again: it effectively went back on its promise not to enter coalitions "at all costs".
This is the fundamental problem with the ANC. It understands only patronage politics and power, so it treated the PA as an equal, because they are cut from the same cloth.
The ANC and the PA have a further bit of shared history at national level. McKenzie and his jailbird pal Kenny Kunene were once described as the "new Guptas", following the father of patronage politics, Zuma, around the globe. The Sunday Times reported in 2017 that the pair were being lined up as BEE partners in a lucrative deal with a Russian oil company. At the time, the pair accompanied Zuma and his then spy boss, David Mahlobo, to Russia to clinch the deal. They were also said to frequent his official residence.
The pair were, at the time, said to be behind a Sunday Independent report on e-mails supposedly exposing a string of affairs between then deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa and young women.
But this is the party the ANC opted to enter into a coalition with, to secure control of the City of Joburg and a handful of Western Cape councils in exchange for handing McKenzie six to eight mayoral seats.
"At the end of the negotiations, the PA will sit with six, seven or eight mayors," McKenzie said, making it clear in an interview with CapeTalk on Tuesday that he wanted "power" to change the lives of those who voted for him. He was also part of negotiations with the DA and ActionSA, but indicated he was doubtful there would ever be a deal between them.
He said he told DA federal council chair Helen Zille that he wanted two member of the mayoral committee positions in Joburg and one in Tshwane, and the DA could not agree to that. So he opted for the ANC.
The PA supported the DA in Nelson Mandela Bay during the tumultuous post-2016 period there. But the DA this week expressed its reservations about the PA’s bona fides after its latest deal with the ANC.
It has long claimed that the PA ran Joburg’s economic portfolios and that it wanted control of its municipal entities, which the PA has denied.
The cost of the pact between the ANC and the PA may now be one that the residents of Joburg will have to bear.
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