DA federal council chair Helen Zille. (Photo by Jaco Marais/Die Burger/Gallo Images via Getty Images)
Democratic Alliance (DA) federal council chair Helen Zille says should the ANC and her party reach a government of unity in Gauteng, they would consider a deal to govern all the hung municipalities in the province together.
Zille told the Mail & Guardian on the sidelines of a media briefing on Tuesday on the parties’ ongoing negotiations over a provincial cabinet that if the ANC did not want to work with the DA, it should say so “to save us a lot of effort”.
If the DA gets its way, this could spell the end of the existing coalition governments in Gauteng’s metros, which include the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and other parties.
Zille said it had been “very difficult” to try to form a provincial government with the ANC in Gauteng.
“It’s not easy negotiating nationally but it’s been particularly difficult negotiating with Gauteng,” she said.
“It was very easy in KwaZulu-Natal and the reason was … the ANC was not the biggest party so they had to take the proportional share. Where they are the biggest party, they don’t want anybody to have the proportional share.”
On Monday ANC Gauteng provincial executive committee member Lebogang Maile said the ANC had concluded a deal with other parties for the Gauteng legislature. He said Premier Panyaza Lesufi had been ready to announce his cabinet on Monday “with or without” the DA, but was told by the ANC’s national leadership to hold the announcement.
At Tuesday’s briefing, Zille said the DA would be comfortable sitting in the opposition benches should the ANC fail to comply with the statement of intent signed by all the parties in the government of national unity (GNU) last month.
“We are saying we are at the table; if you are not prepared to live with these documents, we will go into opposition,” she said.
“We do not mind being an opposition. It’s our comfort zone. It’s not a threat, it’s just a fact. It’s just a fact here that we will be in opposition if the agreements that we signed are not honoured, which is a totally rational position to take.
“We know that the next election is two years from now, which is around the corner; we will see what happens.”
Zille said Lesufi had been expected to announce his cabinet on Monday, but ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula intervened and ordered him not to do so. She said Lesufi had intended to announce seven ANC MECs and three for the DA, leaving the other parties in the unity government out of the provincial coalition.
“The ANC today considered that they had intended to allocate three cabinet seats to the DA and keep seven plus the premier and that is eight for themselves. We said we cannot agree to that,” Zille said.
“The ANC offered to reduce the seven to six, retain the DA at three and give the Inkatha Freedom Party or the Patriotic Alliance one. We welcome the IFP’s possible inclusion, but point out that this is still far short of the requirements of clause 16 of the national statement of intent.”
She said the DA could have chosen to threaten to bring down the unity government in KwaZulu-Natal if the ANC did not agree to the agreements on the statement of intent, but would not do that because they were “responsible people”.
“We don’t want to hand KwaZulu-Natal to the uMkhonto weSizwe party and the EFF. It would be a total disaster. We are not going to do that because there are other levers we are going to use,” Zille said.
A source in the ANC’s national executive committee said all the parties in Gauteng — including the DA and ANC — were negotiating in bad faith and that if the ANC’s provincial structures failed to strike a deal, “national will intervene because ANC is a unitary structure”.
A second senior ANC source confirmed there would be a national intervention if Lesufi and the provincial negotiators failed to secure an agreement.
“If Gauteng cannot deliver a deal, national will,” the source said.