Wave of defections leaves DA reeling in Gauteng
CHAOS erupted in the Ekurhuleni council chambers this week when a Democratic Alliance councillor unexpectedly defected from the party during a debate on the mayor’s address.
Hendrik Shilabe, 46, joined the ANC on Wednesday, saying the DA had “ignored” incidents of racism.
He claimed he was manhandled by three of his DA colleagues, who allegedly tried to push him out of the council chamber. The police were called and Shilabe has laid a complaint of intimidation and assault.
The DA has accused the speaker of the council, Patricia Kumalo, of allowing Shilabe’s defection to be “as dramatic as possible”.
His move was the latest in a flurry of party-hopping, with the DA facing its biggest loss of public representatives since the abolition of floorcrossing in 2009, which forced elected representatives to forfeit their seat if they switched parties.
The Congress of the People is also bleeding public representatives in the runup to an election in which it is expected to suffer heavy losses.
One COPE MP, Nqaba Bhanga, who is known in the National Assembly for his energetic input on higher education, has moved to the DA and will probably be elected to the assembly from the Eastern Cape.
Three of COPE’s most prominent MPs, Juli Kilian, Leonard Ramatlakane and Nick Koornhof, have moved to the ANC and are on the party’s election list. It is understood that they were contacted by the ANC a day before its election list was finalised and told to report to Luthuli House the following morning.
This was despite an objection by some in the ANC that the three had not been nominated by branches.
COPE’s chief whip in the Eastern Cape, Nkosinathi Kuluta, joined the ANC in January.
Kilian, who is a former member of the defunct New National Party-DA and now COPE, said the challenge was to form a block to the right of the trade unions, with the ANC as a part of it.
The DA, which has 82 MPs, has lost five, following resignations.
Beverley Abrahams has joined the ANC, Mpowele Swathe has defected to the United Christian Democratic Party, and Niekie van den Berg, Theo Coetzee and Lourie Bosman have joined the Freedom Front Plus.
Van den Berg and Coetzee ended up in unelectable positions on the DA list after scoring low marks during the party’s selection processes.
Bosman was unhappy about the DA support for the reopening of the land claims process, and Swathe faced a disciplinary hearing after a complaint by a female Limpopo party member.
Van den Berg said this week he felt his future had been decided by a few officials rather than his constituency of Merafong in Gauteng.
He said the DA was not doing enough to protect the interests of Afrikaners.
DA Limpopo MPL Meisie Kennedy has thrown in her lot with the Economic Freedom Fighters.
The DA had, by the end of this week, lost 11 councillors to the ANC, most of them in Gauteng.
In KwaZulu-Natal, two long-serving DA councillors in the Ethekwini metro (Durban) joined the ANC in December.
However, most of the blood-letting for the DA has been in Gauteng. Van den Berg and Abrahams were Gauteng MPs, and most of the DA’s losses to the ANC are in the Joburg metro council, where Gauteng DA premier candidate Mmusi Maimane leads the caucus.
Four are ward councillors, including the long-serving Allison van der Molen, Bev Turk and Dot Corrigan. Another was the DA chief whip, Toni Molefe.
Corrigan said on Facebook the DA in Gauteng was poorly led.
But Maimane has denied that there were problems in his caucus and referred all questions to Gauteng leader John Moodey.
Moodey said nearly all the partyhoppers had faced serious disciplinary charges, especially Corrigan and Turk.
Asked whether the large number of disciplinary cases reflected on the quality of DA public representatives, Moodey said not every activist made a good representative.
He said sometimes people impressed in interviews, but were not hard workers. “The DA sets high standards. Those who cannot keep up tend to leave.”