The EFF and ActionSA would like us to believe they are at war over their views on immigration, but we know better.
The special bond formed between ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba and the EFF’s Julius Malema during the former’s brief stint as Joburg mayor remains strong — but now, after President Cyril Ramaphosa announced November 4 as the date for local government elections, it’s officially election season.
Once the voting is out of the way, we can expect a return to business as usual. In the case of ActionSA and the EFF that means further co-operation of the kind they are now demonstrating in the Tshwane metro and have previously shown in Joburg.
There are real risks going into this election. One is xenophobia and the way it is being fuelled by opportunism to capitalise on a grievance expressed by ordinary citizens as far back as 2008.
Another risk is the shifting electoral landscape.
The 2024 provincial and national elections saw the dramatic rise of former president Jacob Zuma’s MK Party, which took 45% of the vote in KwaZulu-Natal. The coming polls in November will be the party’s first broad test at local government level.
Linked to this shift is the dangerous spike in disillusionment with our democracy, captured in a Human Sciences Research Council study released by the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC).
The worst manifestation of this is playing out in KZN, MK’s stronghold. The research findings prompted the IEC to conduct a special visit to the province, meeting its government and holding a meeting with Zuma and his lieutenants at Nkandla on Monday.
The meeting was convened at the request of the IEC, an important initiative given the support MK enjoys in KZN and the legal challenge to the 2024 election results that Zuma’s party has launched.
MK spokesperson Nhlamulo Ndhlela said that “as a mature” organisation, the party met the IEC to discuss the upcoming election and the situation in the province. Further meetings are expected to be held.
The meeting on Monday did not resolve the legal row between the IEC and MK, which is set down for a court hearing on June 18.
What we’re doing as MK is to hold the IEC accountable, because the integrity of the IEC right now is questionable
— MK Party MP Nhlamulo Ndhlela
Ndhlela says that central to the party’s argument in questioning the outcome of the 2024 election is the two-hour downtime on screens at the national results operations centre in Midrand as votes were being tallied. In its court papers, the IEC describes this as a technical glitch that only affected the screens, and results had continued to be captured regardless. The case has proceeded in fits and starts, due mainly to procedural manoeuvring by MK.
The party contends that KZN residents have lost confidence in the IEC and the electoral process because of alleged irregularities.
“What we’re doing as MK is to hold the IEC accountable,” says Ndhlela, “because the integrity of the IEC right now is questionable and South Africans need to see that there is an organisation such as ourselves that is speaking on their behalf and raising these issues and these inconsistencies.”
The difficulty for the party is that elections in South Africa do have scrupulous checks and balances, with a system of access by all contesting parties to verify vote counting, as well as independent election observers. These processes culminated in the declaration of the 2024 election as free and fair.
But the possibility exists that MK will raise questions about the IEC in the minds of some voters, paving the way for a campaign to discredit the process if the party fails to do well in November. That in turn raises the danger of extra-parliamentary action and possibly violent protests, at least in KZN.
The political environment is already volatile. Some organisations are trying to mobilise support using populist issues such as illegal immigration. These include the March and March movement, Operation Dudula, a handful of local community groups and hostel dwellers.
March and March, headed by Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, staged protests in Pretoria and Joburg last week that forced some shops owned by foreigners to close. In Joburg five Ethiopians were killed in scenes reminiscent of 2008, when 62 people died in a spate of xenophobic violence across the country.
Some observers have denounced the protests as a manifestation of Zulu nationalism, but MK maintains South Africans of all stripes oppose illegal immigration.
ActionSA was among the political parties that joined the protests, but the EFF, which supports open borders in Africa, rejected the victimisation of foreigners. The ANC government, faced with the diplomatic fallout from the violence, decried xenophobia as a deep societal problem and condemned the protests.
Blockades on the Mozambique side of the Lebombo border, apparently in retaliation for the xenophobic attacks in South Africa, have raised concerns in the government about the economic implications of the rising tide of anti-immigrant protests.
The DA, whose Leon Schreiber is minister of home affairs, emphasised the need for both the stricter enforcement of laws regulating foreign visitors and residents and the protection of human rights. The IFP has appealed for calm.
MK, ActionSA and the Patriotic Alliance are at the forefront of fanning anti-immigrant sentiment to rally support ahead of the elections, even though immigration and border control are a national competency and have nothing to do with municipal councils. But opportunism knows no borders.
Marrian is a political analyst at the Bureau for Economic Research
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