One moment it was on, and then — poof! — it was gone. ActionSA’s statement on X on Thursday said it all: “ActionSA notes the withdrawal of the ANC-sponsored urgent motion of no confidence ... in the executive mayor of Tshwane in council today.”
“Notes” is putting it mildly. The effort by the ANC to unseat Democratic Alliance mayor Cilliers Brink is feasible only because ActionSA decided to support it. Now Herman Mashaba’s party has been left stranded, for the moment at least. Of all the political leaders in South Africa, Mashaba has been the most aggressive about never, but never, going into government with the ANC. Much of the support he won after leaving the DA in 2019 was based on his uncompromising disdain for the ruling party.
Now we find his ActionSA acquiescing in supporting a clearly weak new ANC mayor in Johannesburg in return for a council position, and he wants to do it again in Pretoria. Brink took the motion to court to stop it but it is quite likely higher powers in the ANC have been making phone calls to Tshwane as well.
But the entire Tshwane affair throws into sharp relief the fault line in our centre-right politics. The DA was the leader of the pre-election “moonshot pact”, an always fragile alliance. For both Mashaba and the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) leadership, the DA’s participation now in the government of national unity (GNU) with the ANC now means they themselves are sufficiently betrayed to freely join ANC local, and presumably provincial, governments too, when it suits them.
The blue party doesn’t have to jettison its principles, but it does have to change its behaviour and, probably, its leader
And because they and the DA chase the same voters, the aim seems to be to take it out of contention wherever possible, though it has to be said the Gauteng FF+ stood firmly with Brink throughout this latest crisis. In the Western Cape, the FF+ has already turned Oudtshoorn over to the ANC and may threaten more. The moonshot pact is dead.
Brink is clearly a capable mayor, a galaxy better than the DA one he replaced. The attempt to topple him is entirely pernicious, and whoever stepped in to stop Lesufi and his gang from taking over the city has probably not heard the last of it.
The problem with the DA’s former partners now taking it on is that the reasoning is unhinged. Watching the value of the rand rocket and the cost of our debt falling, it’s clear the DA had little option but to join the GNU.The alternative would have been an ANC deal with Julius Malema and the EFF. Investors would have run a mile.
Joining the GNU puts the DA at risk. In a sense it is trapped now by the GNU’s relative calm. It also didn’t save the country, as some of its people believe, because the country isn’t saved. It merely plugged a hole in the hull but using the GNU to justify unseating functioning DA mayors with the ANC in local government is ridiculous. But it at least tells us how fragile and petty our right-of-centre politics can be.
The moonshot pact did badly on May 29. Despite the state of the country, the DA under John Steenhuisen managed to increase its vote by just one percentage point, from 20.7% in 2019 to 21.8% in May. ActionSA won just 1.2% of the vote, half its share in local elections in 2021. Support for the FF+ dipped to 2.06% in May, while the IFP managed an achingly small increase, from 3.38% in 2019 to just 3.85% in the recent polls.
So they are all going nowhere, which may explain the infighting. But the only way out for the DA is to put more votes on the table. And the only way it can do that is by revising the policies and actions that put voters off in the first place. The DA doesn’t have to jettison its principles, but it does have to change its behaviour and probably its leader. Either Brink or Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis would take the party into much more fruitful territory than Steenhuisen has been able to.
Come 2029, the ANC, which shows absolutely no sign of appreciating how rapidly it is failing, will be lucky to get 35%. The DA somehow must get much closer to that than its ambitions so far allow. If only to protect the voters at its core today. If not, the EFF and MK loom.
So no more conceit. No more race-baiters in high government positions. No more denigrating the people who left the party after 2019. Behave impeccably and the country will reward it.
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