Battle for South Africa: will this be the year of the opposition?

With the ANC standing to lose its deciding majority in two of the most critical provinces and possibly a dip below 50% in the national elections, its two main oppositions — the Democratic Alliance and Economic Freedom Fighters — have been working in overdrive to rally some of their allies to form coalitions in a bid to have more of a say in the sixth administration. 

The EFF has been thrust out of any negotiations with the DA which, early on in 2023, proclaimed the red berets as its number one enemy. 

With very little leverage, Julius Malema’s party was forced to enter another round of negotiations with the ANC in a bid for it not to be left out in the cold in 2024. 

This strategy was working for the most part in Gauteng when the EFF’s deputy president Floyd Shivambu negotiated for the party to take a more strategic role in metro governments. 

With the help of the EFF, smaller and largely insignificant parties such as the AIM, ATM and Al Jama-ah took mayoral seats in South Africa’s biggest metros after having negotiated with the ANC to share the spoils. 

While the strategy seemed to have been working for the red berets (which wanted to demonstrate its skills in governing) and the ANC (which was intent on ousting the DA in the metros at all costs) the instability in the working relationship between the two partners started to unravel. 

The ANC’s centrist faction, which had been against the alliance, used the instability in metros as a motive to bulldoze possible talks between the two parties leading up to 2024. 

Malema, at the time, had been closely linked to Gauteng ANC leaders and deputy president Paul Mashatile, who saw his rise within the ANC aligned to that of Malema’s in government. 

However the veterans and the so-called old guard of the party were firmly against any talks of an alliance with Malema. Their fear — legitimately expressed — has been the inconsistent nature of Malema and his “dictatorial” style of leadership. 

Speaking among themselves, the party leaders have often recounted how Malema tried to “bully” them into an “unfair” coalition in 2016 which would have meant that the ANC surrender its powers and abandon its own policy direction. 

In 2021, Malema cemented his position and character to his doubters in the party when he unceremoniously voted with the DA in taking control of the Johannesburg metro, abandoning talks with the ANC to form a coalition. 

However the EFF has since dumped the DA in the Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal councils, where it is again working with the ANC.

Another point of contention which ultimately led to a breakdown in any possible partnership talks between the two parties was Malema’s conduct in the amendment of the land expropriation bill. 

In June 2021, the ANC had hoped to pass the bill in parliament with the help of the EFF about the proposed changes to the parts of the Constitution dealing with the redistribution of land.

The ANC had initially met with the EFF leadership as both parties agreed on the terms of the amendment, but the EFF raised two issues. 

The points of contention are the custodianship of the land, and the current cut-off for the restitution of property of 19 June 1913, the date of the passing of the Natives Land Act, which stripped black people of existing land ownership and restricted them to ownership  of less than 7% of South Africa. 

The EFF was determined that the bill read “nationalisation” instead of “custodianship” and wanted the bill to reflect the words “no compensation” instead of “nil compensation”. 

The EFF leaders reneged on the agreement on 26 May when the party failed to attend a virtual meeting for bilateral talks with the ANC. The deadlock between the two parties resulted in an extension of the ad hoc committee’s deadline.

This angered the ANC, which had hoped the bill would be passed in part to demonstrate President Cyril Ramaphosa’s determination to meet the resolutions set by the party’s 2017 conference. 

The EFF has now positioned itself as the head of a second coalition grouping leaning to the left of the ANC,  a move which was boosted on 16 December by the announcement by former president Jacob Zuma that he would vote — and campaign — for the newly launched uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party.

Zuma and his backers hope to take votes from the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal and in Gauteng and at national level, working in concert with the EFF, United Democratic Movement (UDM), Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and other small parties they have worked with thus far at local government level.

At the party launch, Zuma made it clear that the MK would be working with “forces of the left” to remove the Ramaphosa-led ANC from power, holding consultations with 10 other small parties during the build-up process.

The de facto defection of Zuma from the ANC will boost the EFF’s hopes in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, both of which were devastated by the deadly riots sparked by Zuma’s incarceration on contempt of court charges in 2021.

While the EFF-led coalition is unlikely to be able to unseat the ANC outright in either province — or nationally — it will be aiming to force its way into a number of coalition governments with the ANC, much as it has done in the metropolitan councils thus far.

While the DA had led the process of forming and consolidating the Multi-Party Charter for South Africa since April, this has been complicated by the entry of a new right-of-centre party, Change Starts Now, led by former businessperson Roger Jardine.

While Jardine has been touted as a potential leader for the charter due to the limitations of DA leader John Steenhuisen and other MPC top brass, there has been an immediate backlash from the other parties.

The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the Freedom Front Plus and other member parties argue that they will not allow a presidential candidate to be imposed on them ahead of the elections.

Leaders of both say that any discussions on a presidential candidate — imported or otherwise — would have to take place after the polls, and not ahead of the election as had been envisaged by the financial community, which wants Jardine to take on the role.

DA federal chairperson Helen Zille told the Mail & Guardian that despite all the progress it was too soon to be labelling 2024 the year of the opposition.

“I don’t like labels,” Zille said. “I just work as hard as I can to advance a functional, inclusive and prosperous democracy in South Africa.”

Zille declined to discuss election strategy, saying this was “not my lane” but said there was “no truth whatsoever” to rumours that she had been holding discussions with ANC deputy president Paul Mashatle about a potential ANC-DA coalition.

“There is no truth to this rumour whatsoever. We are putting everything we have into the Multi-Party Charter,” Zille said.

Zille said she believed that “intense and committed hard work on the right things” could deliver for the DA across the country and that it had the capacity and the people to govern beyond the Western Cape.

“We are a political party. Our key objective is to win elections and become the  government,” Zille said.

“We did not have any experience when we won Cape Town in a coalition and later the Western Cape. We can hit the ground running and we have far more experience now than we had then.”

She said that while Zuma’s departure had “opened the field in KwaZulu-Natal”, she would not forecast where the DA would succeed.

“We are still a long way out. I do not make predictions,” Zille said.

While the 2024 elections can be seen as the DA’s biggest test on whether it could unseat the ANC and lend itself as the governing party — albeit through a coalition — it’s also a make-or-break election for Steenhuisen. 

Steenhuisen was brought in as a caretaker party leader following the resignation of Mmusi Maimane, who lost a fight for the soul of the party to a faction aligned to Steenhuisen and Zille. 

Maimane resigned after an investigation commissioned by the party into its 2019 electoral losses and ­conducted by a team including one of his major detractors, Tony Leon, found him to be mainly responsible for its failings at the polls.

Another exodus of black DA leaders followed and continued after Steenhuisen’s election as party leader.

However, Steenhuisen’s popularity within the party is waning. DA funders have already expressed their lack of confidence in his leadership, giving rise to the move to install Jardine as the face of the moonshot coalition on their part.

The DA leader has also been accused of lacking the personality to connect with both the party’s historical ground and the much larger pool of black voters by his critics within the party.

The events which led to the ousting of Maimane have also set a precedent in the party, much like that of the Polokwane conference which resulted in the recall of Thabo Mbeki. 

Some high-profile leaders within the DA have already identified Geordin Hill-Lewis as a possible candidate to take over from Steenhuisen should the latter fail to bring in the numbers in the polls next year. 

Steenhuisen’s moonshot pact, which gave rise to the Multi-Party Charter, has been heralded as one of his biggest coups politically. However, it may not be enough to ensure he remains the leader following the 2024 elections. 

Another stumbling block for the DA is its coalition partners who are likely to take a chunk of its votes rather than that of the ANC. 

ActionSA, a splinter party of the DA started by its former Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba, has been predicted to at least receive 4% of the votes in the general elections slated for May. 

ActionSA has recruited most of its leaders from the DA — most of whom are deemed good ground workers. 

These include former DA leader Athol Trollip, who now leads the party’s ground work in the Eastern Cape and Zwakele Mncwangu, who together with Mbali Ntuli penetrated the stubborn Zululand regions when they were with the DA. 

Another ally that has already proven to be a thorn for the DA’s side in elections is the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), which leveraged on the DA’s “ANC-lite” reputation during Maimane’s time and took mainly white and Afrikaans-speaking voters from the DA. 

The party received more than double its previous support in 2019. More recently, election analyst Dawie Scholtz found that DA support in suburban areas decreased from 81.9% to 70.5% of the vote.

The FF+ by contrast increased its suburban support base from 2.6% to 8.4%, News24 reported. 

While the IFP has consolidated the comeback it has made in KwaZulu-Natal in recent provincial and local government elections and has cemented its role in the Multi-Party Charter, its leader, Velenkosini Hlabisa, faces some challenges.

Hlabisa — who survived an attempt to oust him by supporters of powerful provincial chairperson Thami Ntuli late last year — was forced to move to the National Assembly to replace Mangosuthu Buthelezi after the prince’s death.

Ntuli is now the IFP’s de facto ­premier candidate and remains in close contact with the party’s main constituency, which is KwaZulu-Natal.