Howard Barrell
The African National Congress is pulling out all the stops to seize control of the government of the Western Cape from the New National Party in the election on June 2 – and it believes it has a good chance of succeeding.
The ANC’s strategy depends on persuading upwards of six leading coloured figures in the NNP to defect to it in the next fortnight.
ANC planning also turns on the decline in support for the NNP in the Western Cape and on the low level of voter registration in the coloured community. Coloureds make up more than half the voting age population in the province and, in 1994, provided the NNP’s main local support base.
An informed source said the national ANC leadership has sent word to local party workers that it must take the Western Cape “at all costs”.
The ANC believes it can realistically aim to emerge as the largest single party in the Western Cape legislature after June 2 – if it does not win an absolute majority. It hopes this will enable it to call the shots in the provincial government.
One of the senior Cape Nationalists who has been wooed by the ANC for several weeks told the Mail & Guardian: “The ANC has certainly done its homework on us.”
A number of less prominent coloured leaders in the NNP have recently joined the ANC in the province.
The ANC leadership in the Western Cape would not be drawn this week on indications that it is preparing to stage-manage the crossover to it of leading coloured NNP members in the provincial legislature in the next fortnight – to coincide with the launch of its election campaign when Parliament closes later this month.
But ANC provincial representative Cameron Dugmore said: “We are determined to end NNP rule in the province, and obviously our campaign to win over NNP leadership is part of that. The ANC would be on the lookout for any leaders of the NNP who can bring a following across to us.”
The ANC has had difficulty tying up a deal with the group of potential NNP defectors because of the cast-iron assurances some of them have sought about their futures within the ANC, or in the Department of Foreign Affairs or parastatal sector.
The most prominent potential defectors – Western Cape MEC for Health Peter Marais and MEC for Local Government Patrick McKenzie – are charismatic populists with big followings on the Cape Flats. The ANC hopes that their defection to it would broaden backing for the ANC in the coloured community, where ANC support has traditionally been restricted to the middle classes and intellectual strata.
One potential defector who spoke to the M&G on condition of anonymity said he and others had concluded it was “very difficult to look after our people any longer as members of the NNP”.
He said the coloured community were almost alone in not getting any benefits from the post- apartheid era. This had to be corrected.
“I have businessmen coming up to me and saying: `Before 1994 I used to get lots of contracts. Now they all go to blacks and whites.’
“Look, if the ANC doesn’t win the Western Cape, they will move Parliament away from here and the economy here will go down. We have to avoid that,” he said.
Electoral experts say the ANC’s hope of winning over substantial numbers of new coloured voters through the defection of NNP members is probably misplaced. “What the ANC can more realistically hope for is that the defections would reduce further the total number of votes the NNP gets in the province – which will have a similar effect,” said one leading opinion pollster.
Fewer voters have registered to vote in the Western Cape than in any other province. Before the last round of registration, fewer than half the voting age population in the province (then calculated at 47%) had put their names forward for the voters’ roll. At that stage, the rate of registration in the province was poorest among coloureds, the NNP’s main support base.
But, among the ANC’s main support base, blacks, the rate of registration has been high – some estimates say higher than 80%.
These figures suggest that opinion poll estimates of NNP support in the province, which put it at about 26%, may translate into a substantially smaller share of the vote when people cast their ballots. Likewise, current estimates of ANC support in the province, at about 27%, may convert into a higher proportion of actual votes.
The best guess for the province is still, according to the opinion pollsters, a hung result with the Democratic Party and United Democratic Movement holding the balance of power. But, if the ANC emerges as the largest single party, the DP and UDM could find it difficult to form a coalition with the NNP which excludes the ANC. Instead, the province could find itself with another government of provincial unity, this time very much dominated by the ANC.