Peter Bruce Of mayors and messes
Groucho Marx said that “politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies”. As a result, Athol Trollip is no longer mayor of Nelson Mandela Bay. Solly Msimanga just held on to Tshwane on Thursday. Of the DA mayors who won metropolitan office after the 2016 local government elections, including Cape Town, only the mayor of Johannesburg is safe — and even there the reason might not be pretty.
At the middle of all of this is a decent man, Mmusi Maimane, the DA leader. Those elections were a triumph for him. Jacob Zuma had wrenched the last shreds of credibility from the ANC and voters stayed away. The result was hung councils everywhere and, with the connivance of the EFF, the DA was able to take office in all of SA’s really big cities other than Durban.
Yes, it was messy, but coalitions, formal or otherwise, were the future, no? Maimane had a curious faith in Julius Malema, the EFF leader. Malema, Maimane felt, was a man of his word. If he said he’d do something he did it.
But Malema has many words. He had turned dying for Zuma into killing him off politically. On Thursday someone helpfully retweeted Malema from June 16 2016: “We will never vote with the ANC! We are in this mess because of the ANC! How will we explain ourselves?”
Yet there was the EFF, ganging up with the ANC on Thursday to get rid of Msimanga through separate votes of no confidence in Tshwane. Spectacularly, both failed, and when the EFF’s did it stormed out so it didn’t actually vote with the ANC. Msimanga survived. In Nelson Mandela Bay, however, the EFF and the ANC joyfully upset Trollip a few days earlier and have joined hands in a new local government.
The DA will challenge Trollip’s ousting in court but hopefully not on some grand moral principle. Principle went out the window when the DA accepted the EFF’s hidden hand in order to take the big cities.
Now, as the EFF and ANC may be working together to undo what 2016 created, suddenly they, as per Msimanga, “support and stand by corruption and wrongdoing”. Yet when they were with the DA they were honest and reliable? Give me a break.
The DA needs to reset itself, not to continue trying to find common cause with the impossible. There’s nothing normal about this first period of coalition politics. Coalitions work between vaguely like-minded parties, not between polar opposites. As Tony Leon suggested after finding himself in a TV “debate” with an EFF spokesperson the other day “you can have a conversation with someone who thinks 2+2=5, not when the answer is 87”.
Holding office without holding real power in precarious arrangements with the EFF is dangerous ahead of a general election next year. More important for Maimane is to settle the increasingly nasty policy debate in the DA about empowerment. Should it support overt black empowerment or adopt race-neutral economic policies that would benefit black people the most anyway, simply because they are in the majority?
There’s a DA federal executive meeting in October, when the question has to be decided. Basically, the liberals (mainly white) in the party don’t like race-based policy. The social democrats in the DA (mainly black) do. Here’s how it plays. On Thursday Makashule Gana, a young DA leader, tweeted a graphic showing what percentage of our different race groups live, officially, in poverty. The graph went from 64.2% black African through to 1% white. Next to it he wrote: “To paraphrase leader Mmusi Maimane, every day one needs to ask on whose behalf are you doing your politics? Who are you representing? This picture gives me sleepless nights. I have to continue working to change it.”
Here’s how Ryan Coetzee, former DA strategist and a strong party liberal, replied: “The DA does politics on behalf of all South Africans, right? The biggest challenge is poverty and the things that drive it. Therefore correct to focus on those things. Is this a good summary?” Get it? It’s subtle as hell. Clearly, they are poles apart.
And there’s your battle, Mmusi — understated and savage at the same time. It’s for the soul of your party and I suspect your heart is with Gana, not Coetzee.
But the DA liberals will have no fudging ahead of 2019. If you thought keeping Malema on the straight and narrow was difficult, good luck creating a whole new economic policy in a month.