Gwede Mantashe and Cyril Ramaphosa at the 112th ANC anniversary rally in Mbombela on January 13, 2024. (Photo by PHILL MAGAKOE / AFP)
Thursday.
A little over a week ago, the promises, insults and tales of doom were flying as our political class tore at each other’s throats ahead of voting day on 29 May.
The battle lines were drawn — indelibly, we were told — as the party leaders hit the hustings, swearing blood oaths to keep each other out of office and away from the fiscus and policy formulation.
All concerned — from the moonshot coalition to the ANC and former president Jacob Zuma’s Umkhonto we Sizwe party — were committed to the mandates they were seeking from the votes, their manifestos and securing a majority to govern the country.
The will of their voters was sacrosanct.
But within less than 24 hours of the last vote being cast, this all changed.
As they watched their majority slip away on the leaderboards, ANC leaders at the Results Operation Centre were already reaching out to their former comrades — and enemies — of a week ago.
The results ceremony was hardly over and the moonshot leaders were already burying their pact — as was expected — live and direct on national TV.
The parties were now “released” from their pre-election agreement to seek a coalition with the ANC — the same party they swore to remove from government if they managed to get over the line.
As we speak, politicians who two weeks ago would have crossed the road to avoid each other — who were calling each other thieves, thugs and racists — are making nice, trying to divide what is left of our fair Republic among themselves.
By Saturday, Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema had made it clear that his party was open for business.
Not only had the party withdrawn its objection to the election result, but it was not making the removal of Cyril Ramaphosa a precondition to participation in any kind of coalition agreement with the ANC.
The ANC’s leadership is still to decide which way it will swing to stay in government for another term, but has made it clear that it will be guided by the leaderboard, rather than ideology, when it comes to choosing a partner.
For his part, Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen appears to have found a new swart gevaar to replace the EFF in the form of the MK party.
John’s televised speech announcing his plan to avert a Doomsday Coalition involving the ANC by joining it himself — a segue of some note — contained way more references to the MK party than the EFF.
A sign of things to come, or the result of too many hours spent waiting for the final result to be released?
Down here in the kingdom, it’s chilly.
Chilly, but nowhere near as cold as it is at the ANC headquarters at Luthuli House.
There, it’s vibing Iceland — make that Antarctica — with the temperature plummeting to an icy -71.
Losing one’s majority nationally and in the country’s most populous and economically productive provinces — and the Northern Cape — after three decades in the pound seats will do that.
At Pixley ka Isaka Seme House across the road from Durban’s International Convention Centre, where the ANC’s KwaZulu-Natal provincial leadership is based, the mercury has also plummeted.
There it is an Arctic -30.
That’s how many of its 44 seats the ANC has handed over to the MK party, which is laughing its way to the provincial legislature — court cases and boycotts by Zuma’s party permitting.
Once the legislature sits in Pietermaritzburg, most of the remaining 14 will spend the next five years in the opposition benches — the wrong side of the political tracks.
The ANC failed to number the numbers and can at best hope for a stray seat in the cabinet, which is put together as a result of the talks about talks among the parties.
It’s been a while since the comrades sat to the left of the speaker in the provincial legislature — two decades to be precise — so the less upholstered MPL seats will take some getting used to.
The Taliban faction of the ANC in the province swept to power at its 2022 provincial conference, humiliating former chairperson Sihle Zikalala with a landslide victory and recalling him as premier not long thereafter.
That was, arguably, the last time they got anything right.
As a result last week the voters in the province — many of them previously ANC — did to the Taliban what they did to Zikalala and gave them a thumping.
Cold.
It may be cold outside the ANC, as one of its former presidents once rightly said, but it appears to now be even colder within, given the outcome of the elections last week.
Cold indeed.