ActionSA’s Eastern Cape chairperson, Athol Trollip.
ActionSA’s Eastern Cape chairperson, Athol Trollip, has added his voice to the debate about the “moonshot pact”, saying Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen will not automatically be first in line for the post of president should the coalition emerge victorious in the 2024 elections.
Speaking to the Mail & Guardian this week, Trollip said for the pact to work, all parties must be prepared to make compromises.
Steenhuisen announced the planned coalition agreement during his reelection speech in April as part of the DA’s plan to drive the ANC’s electoral support below 50% next year and keep the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) out of power by uniting smaller parties towards a target of collectively garnering 51% of the vote.
The DA is expected to host opposition parties at a national convention on 16 and 17 August to try to negotiate a pre-election agreement.
Trollio said that it was likely that the DA, as the larger party, would want the jobs in the presidency, as it had done in coalitions in South Africa’s metros.
“I had an opinion that the largest party would be like the senior partner in a law firm. But I’ve seen things evolving now,” he said.
“In my discussions on the moonshot pact, preparations for this convention, over the last eight meetings, there seems to be a consensus starting that the position of president isn’t necessarily going to go to the biggest party. It’s going to go to the most appropriate person, and it’s going to take them massive negotiations.”
For the convention to work the DA and other opposition parties must be willing to compromise.
“It’s going to take leadership, and it’s going to take a serious amount of maturity. Unfortunately, up until now, there is a death of maturity in our political dispensation. There is too much finger pointing rather than pointing in the right direction. And there’s way too much ego involved,” Trollip said.
The new kid on the block, ActionSA, has indicated interest in the pact, but Trollip said some parties were reluctant to join because it would take away their political identities. Those already in talks on the pact say the cabinet should be shrunk considerably, he added.
“That’s definitely part of the conversation, there’s some consensus forming around that, where a number of the bigger parties agree that the cabinet has to be cut right down. And there’s, you know, some differences between 16 to 18 positions, and whether there will be no deputy minister positions, or a few deputy minister positions in the really big departments.”
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s bloated cabinet has been a contentious issue. He promised to shrink it during his first state of the nation address in February 2018 but has failed to keep that pledge.
Trollip said Steenhuisen and some DA leaders had not ruled out a coalition with the ANC, which made some political parties hesitant to join the pact.
“That’s why I found it really difficult. When I hear commentary from the DA, and John Steenhuisen saying we’re going to leave the front door and the back door open, now to me, I have great difficulty with that,” he said.
“And that is one of the subjects that we will negotiate and discuss at this convention. Because you can’t go into a meaningful relationship with another political organisation, if then say no, I’m discussing a relationship with you now but I’ve got my eye on somebody else.”
He added that parties such as the Patriotic Alliance must be invited to the discussions to avoid making the pact an exclusive club.
“We don’t have enough people buying into this pact yet to get past 51%. And if you are shooting for the moon and you don’t have the rocket and the fuel to get you to the moon and you land among the stars, you end up in the sea … So that’s [what] we’ve been saying to the DA.
“I dealt with Gayton Mckenzie, he is a difficult customer and he drives a hard bargain … But if you look at the policies, they are not far from ActionSA, the DA, IFP [Inkatha Freedom Party],” Trollip said.
In April, Steenhuisen said the DA’s poll suggests the party is only 10 percentage points behind the ANC in terms of electoral support going into next year’s general elections.
But news outlet EWN reported the same month that a survey of 3 600 people across the country by market research company Ipsos and the Inclusive Society Institute suggested that a national coalition made up of the opposition was highly unlikely and that no coalition could be formed without the EFF.
The poll also predicted that support for the DA would drop to under 16% in the next elections.
“I still think that the DA are going to do less than they anticipate in the next election so that might deflate the expectations quite a bit,” Trollip said.
“And that’s why it’s even more important for a convention that will yield something where the sum of the parts is greater than the individual parts.
“Once the votes are counted, when the cold hard reality of those numbers is put on the table … we are either short of votes or we’ve got enough votes, then the real negotiations about who’s going to drive this vehicle, the sum of all our parts together to take this country into a new dispensation.”