THE GREAT COALITION DATING GAME

In the matchmaking merry-go-round that is SA politics, larger parties are increasingly leaning on smaller ones to shore up their power. In leveraging their outsize influence the small guys are the political winners but, so far, it’s the electorate that’s losing out

efore the Easter weekend. Freedom Front

Plus (FF+) chief whip Corné Mulder hosted a lunch at his home. It was a casual event but would be crucial for the coalition landscape in South Africa, from Joburg to Matzikama, Kou-Kamma to Rustenburg, Lekwa to uMdoni. In attendance were two key players: DA leader John Steenhuisen and Gayton McKenzie, leader of the Patriotic Alliance (PA).

Though at Mulder’s house, the meeting had been organised at the behest of Steenhuisen, who has been looking to unite South Africa’s opposition parties in a “moonshot pact” to unseat the ANC in the 2024 national election.

It’s not an implausible idea, given the ANC’s crumbling dominance in local government elections in 2021. Those polls resulted in a record number of hung

Bcouncils across the country, including in former ANC strongholds such as the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape and Limpopo. Steenhuisen and McKenzie were meeting at a crucial time. In just over a week, the new leadership of South Africa’s biggest-budget city would be decided.

Joburg is one of the roughly 80 hung councils dotted around South Africa. As has become par for the course in such councils, the metro has been paralysed by political infighting. It has had no consistent leadership since the 2021 local government polls and is on its sixth mayor in just two years.

Mulder, who confirms the meeting, has been a crucial middle ground in opposition party coalition talks a Switzerland of sorts. He has chaired meetings to help parties find each other and build governments. The FF+ has been hailed by parties across the political spectrum, including ActionSA and even the ANC, for the “sober” manner in which it deals with sensitive political power plays.

On this particular afternoon Mulder, Steenhuisen, McKenzie and another PA leader, Charles Cilliers, met over that favourite place among South African institutions, where commitments are made and deals are struck: the braai.

At the meeting, McKenzie tells the FM, there were informal discussions about the way in which positions could be shared between parties working together to run the Joburg council. The proposal was for the DA, as the largest party, to take up crucial council posts such as speaker and committee chairs; the PA was to take up the mayoral seat and two MMC positions; and the FF+ would hold the chair of chairs position.

As McKenzie tells it, the deal was a

long way from being set in stone. Steenhuisen, he says, made it clear he would have to raise the issue with, and obtain approval from, the party’s federal council, chaired by Helen Zille.

To McKenzie’s disappointment, it fell flat. He tells the FM that shortly after the meeting, the DA in Tshwane asked for the PA’s help in passing that metro’s budget. He rustled up his councillor the night before the budget vote, he says, and convinced her to vote with the DA. But the party’s first attempt to pass the budget was scuppered when DA coalition partner Good decided to side with the ANC.

Fast-forward two weeks. Mulder, McKenzie and the DA’s Gauteng leadership were meeting once more formally this time, with other opposition parties in tow to discuss the fate of the Joburg council. The meeting took place a day after a council sitting to elect a new mayor, following the resignation of Al Jama-ah Thapelo Amad.

The ANC and EFF spent the better part of the day managing caucus breakdowns of their own. For a start, the meeting was pushed out after ANC councillors pushed back against Gauteng ANC chair Panyaza Lesufi’s ambition to hand the mayorship to a small party, preferring their own Dada Morero for the position. For the coalition to muster the necessary votes, it had to take into account the EFF’s preference for a smaller party representative as mayor.

The delay gave the opposition parties some breathing room to iron out their own differences. But in the end, they couldn’t agree on a mayoral candidate, and so put forward two: the DA’s Mpho Phalatse and ActionSA’s Funzi Ngobeni.

The failure to unite around a candidate was not for lack of trying. The FM understands that during the daylong talks a number of scenarios were envisioned, including having McKenzie as a mayoral candidate, or PA chair Kenny Kunene.

There was, McKenzie says, even a point where the PA and ActionSA agreed that Phalatse should stand, and that they would vote in her favour. But a subsequent demand by the DA for the PA to renounce its working relationship with the ANC in other hung councils was a step too far, says McKenzie, and his party pulled out of the talks.

In the DA’s defence, it had previously been burnt by the PA and didn’t want the party’s flip-flopping between the DA-led coalition and the ANC to bring more instability to Joburg. Hence the demand for the PA to withdraw from its coalitions with the ANC, says DA provincial leader Solly Msimanga.

Meanwhile, on the ANC side, Luthuli House intervened in the impasse between its Joburg caucus and the party’s provincial leadership.

But a key complication for the ANC’s Joburg coalition was that the EFF’s long-standing demand for the mayoral seat in Ekurhuleni remained on the table. For the EFF to support Morero, in other words, the ANC would have to hand the mayoralty of the East Rand