Voters are watching the opposition — and it’s not pretty

It has not been a great week for opposition parties. Veteran politician Mosiuoa Lekota and COPE hogged the headlines for all the wrong reasons when a press conference, in which he was to announce the suspension of his deputy, Willie Madisha, and a host of other party leaders, turned into a fistfight.

Then the City of Johannesburg, one of the metros that fell under the control of a DA-led coalition after last year’s local government elections, was plunged into turmoil when some members of the coalition joined forces with the ANC and the PAC to oust speaker Vasco da Gama via a vote of no confidence.

The COPE fiasco would not have come as a surprise to anyone. The once promising opposition party, which, it can be argued, started the end of the ANC’s electoral invincibility in 2009 when it took more than a million votes from the governing party, is a spent force and its remaining leaders are now fighting over its carcass.

The sooner it closes shop, the better for all concerned. This is specially so for Lekota, a political figure with a proud history of standing for justice and freedom — even when doing so could land you in a grave or prison.

Whatever you thought of Lekota’s politics after 1994, there was always something admirable about how he carried himself — refusing to quietly toe the line if he didn’t agree with his colleagues in the ANC and government.

When the ANC, for instance, recalled president Thabo Mbeki from office in 2008, Lekota could have behaved like many other ministers who were unhappy with the decision — put his head down and hope that the new powers at Luthuli House would let him keep his job.

Instead, he chose to quit both government and party and went on to help found COPE. Since then, he has committed numerous political mistakes and some of those contributed to COPE losing most of the votes it had garnered in 2009.

But there can be no denying his important role in helping to shape post-apartheid SA into a real multiparty democracy in which there is a realistic chance of political power changing hands through a democratic process.

But as the brawl that took place in Boksburg during Lekota’s press conference showed, he and COPE have run out of ideas and it is time they left the battle to others.

The ongoing suspensions and counter-suspensions will not only lead to COPE bleeding the last of the 50,000 voters it got in the previous elections, but will further undermine people’s confidence in the opposition as a whole.

With the ANC said to be headed for its worst electoral performance since 1994, and even the most charitable pundits saying the party would be lucky to secure more than 45% of the vote, the spotlight is increasingly falling on the opposition for signs of what a post-ANC future might look like.

Not pretty, if you were to judge by the events of the past week, where allegations of back-stabbing and bribery accompanied the ousting of Da Gama.

That coalition governments are unstable and can be dissolved at any time due to disagreement between partners is neither new nor controversial.

So it is no surprise that, following Da Gama’s removal, the ANC is smelling mayor Mpho Phalatse’s blood and measuring the mayoral chain to see if it will fit around the neck of its Johannesburg chair, Dada Morero.

The ANC is probably jumping the gun and Phalatse will still be mayor come Christmas because, unlike Da Gama, she has not rubbed some of her coalition partners up the wrong way.

However, what is worrying about what happened in the Johannesburg council is the allegation by the DA and one of its partners, the African Christian Democratic Party, that some councillors in the coalition accepted bribes to vote for the other side.

They are yet to produce evidence that substantiates these allegations.

Obviously it would be naive to assume that the opposition is made up only of angels who want to do good, just as it would be wrong to think that everyone in the ruling party is a thief.

But if it is found that some councillors from the ruling coalition in Johannesburg accepted money under the table in return for voting against their parties’ wishes, it has the potential to erode the public’s confidence in the entire political system.

Corruption is the primary reason many voters are turning away from the ANC; why would they give their votes to the opposition if it, too, harbours public representatives with the same rotten values they found repugnant elsewhere?

The outcomes of the next elections are not merely dependent on what the ANC does between now and 2024; they also rest on the conduct of the opposition where it already governs through coalitions.

This past week it didn’t put its best foot forward.