DA federal council chair Helen Zille described last week as tough over the negotiations for cabinet positions, in which her party almost walked away.
“We had to face the fact that the ANC had no intention of honouring the Statement of Intent we signed with them, especially on the proportionality principle in the composition of government,” Zille told the Sunday Times.
Zille and her colleagues were frustrated and often described the situation as being on a “knife-edge”, according to party sources.
“You put your foot down on something, and there's no reaction, you put your foot on the brake and nothing happens, you put your foot on the clutch and nothing happens,” she is said to have told a grouping of the party's young leaders on Thursday.
At the centre of the tension was what the DA said was the ANC reneging on its agreement that someone from the DA would be in charge of the trade and industry portfolio.
“Having asked us to keep the negotiations out of the public eye and continue to negotiate in good faith, [then] the ANC leaked the letter I sent them last weekend. They also misrepresented the list of portfolios in which the DA expressed an interest as 'demands'. This distortion of the contents of the letter, and the offence the ANC took to it, was designed to build public pressure on us to reach a deal on the ANC’s terms,” she said.
We will not become pawns of the ANC
— Helen Zille
This week DA leader John Steenhuisen received a letter from his counterpart in the negotiations, Cyril Ramaphosa, stating the ANC was open to discuss a partnership with other parties.
Zille said the leaks and hostility from the ANC showed they did not want power-sharing. “The ANC wanted to co-opt us to prop them up, giving them time to craft a political recovery plan. They were trying to bait the hook with just enough portfolios to reel us in on their terms,” Zille told the Sunday Times on Saturday.
Apart from pressure piling up from all quarters, the hate-mail started rolling in, she said.
“The DA had to ask itself some hard existential questions. It is not our job to rescue the ANC. It is our job to rescue South Africa. And we had to find a way of doing it without destroying the DA, which would be a disaster for SA.”
With the option of pulling out, and fears the ANC was considering dumping them, the DA decided to do nothing in the short term.
“We carefully considered the six portfolios offered to us — three short of the proportion which were our rightful claim in terms of the electoral results and the agreement of June 14.,” she said.
“We also considered the fact that we had meticulously honoured our obligations in terms of the agreement: we had elected Cyril Ramaphosa as President, and Thoko Didiza as Speaker. We had also supported the election of ANC candidates in the National Council of Provinces and in Gauteng, and we backed the ANC in getting its fair proportion of positions in KZN. They were clearly not prepared to keep their side of the bargain.”
She said they wrote back to Ramaphosa accepting the offer of the six, including the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (DTIC), but requesting an additional two, based on the signed agreement.
“Again the ANC leaked the letter and sought to present us as unreasonable and bickering over positions. Again, we kept our side of the bargain not to conduct negotiations through the media.”
Things got worse, she says.
“Then came the guillotine that brought us to the brink of walking away. Facing internal resistance to offering us DTIC, the president withdrew the portfolio and offered us Tourism instead. At that point it became clear that the ANC wished to exclude us from all meaningful involvement in the key economic portfolios. They wanted us in office but not in power. We were prepared to walk away.”
This time the pressure turned to the ANC and after meetings and phone calls between DA leader John Steenhuisen and the President, a possible compromise started emerging.
The negotiations had improved by Saturday but nothing is yet finalised.
“We are cautiously optimistic that there could be an agreement before the end of the weekend,” she said. “However, as usual in these circumstances, much can go wrong over the next 36 hours.”
“If we do end with a deal, it will not be what the ANC wanted, and it will not be what we wanted. But there will be enough to give us a real shot at exercising a powerful influence inside government and of running some crucial portfolios.”
“We are determined to make it work in order to fulfil our commitment to voters to rescue South Africa. We will not become pawns of the ANC. We will stand our ground. And we will put the country first.”
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