ANC giving away vote to EFF spits in face of voters
Last week the ANC announced it would be charging its Ekurhuleni regional chairperson Mzwandile Masina for defying the party’s instruction to vote for an EFF candidate to be mayor of that municipality.
Masina and his regional committee say they could not accept the proposal by the party bosses to help the EFF, which wanted the ANC to vote it into power in Ekurhuleni in exchange of doing the same for the ANC in Joburg.
The EFF would have total control of Ekurhuleni and the ANC of Joburg.
Masina and his comrades reneged on this agreement and the ANC head honchos want to punish him for what they see as ill-discipline. The ANC is free to do as it pleases with its members. However, the ANC is not free to overrule the choice of the electorate and give whomever it decides, power to control a municipality.
It is worse when this power is given to a party that came in third in the polls, winning a mere 13.6 % of the vote and who could not convince a single ward to directly vote for them. The 92,919 votes the EFF got is about 101,000 votes less than the second most voted for party, the DA with 194,739 votes. The ANC received 254,782 votes.
To give such a party power would have been a slap in the faces of the electorate in Ekurhuleni. It would amount to spitting in their faces just so the party could enjoy power elsewhere. While that sounds inevitable in coalition politics of horse trading, it is dangerously undemocratic in a country where the right to vote is hard won.
The democratic dividend does not belong to the ANC and EFF to pass around as they wish. It is the fruit of the toil of countless South Africans, many who gave up their lives for it.
It is one thing for the ANC to partner with the smallest parties in the municipality to form a government. It is totally a different thing to give all power to such a party.
Some argue that giving a political party a municipality to run on its own would enable voters to make better decisions in the next election, knowing what that party is capable of. This is frankly an undemocratic argument. A party that wants to demonstrate what it can do if entrusted with power should work harder at convincing voters and win an election.
Until it wins power, it should respect the objective fact that the electorate did not give it the mandate to control a municipality. If it values democracy it should say “no thanks” to being imposed on the electorate.
That elections are expensive and sometimes give us outcomes that make it difficult to form governments of the like-minded is no good reason to sell and buy election outcomes as cheaply as the ANC and EFF want
to. We cannot dispense of elections and settle for the easier path of distributing power just so that we can all move on with our lives with less stress. It just does not work that way.
The argument of those who think things will be much easier if we might as well cancel elections and distribute municipalities among political parties – like the colonialists carved up Africa at the Berlin Conference in 1884. There, European powers agreed on the rules to partition Africa to avoid unnecessary clashes between “civilised” nations.
The ANC and EFF are behaving in 2022 in exactly the same manner as what transpired in Berlin over 200 years ago. They have completely forgotten the human beings in the picture and think this is all about them and their interests.
It does not matter what it stands to gain, no party should be allowed to give power to another when the electorate has pronounced itself on the matter.
That coalition governments are the inevitable future of our politics should not make us so desperate to allow anyone, regardless of what voters think, call the shots.
This democracy is our hard fought for inheritance. I would rather live with the uncertainty of coalitions than see it given up at the altar of political expediency.