Donwald Pressly
Democratic Alliance nervousness about its control of the Cape Town unicity is surfacing in pressure for a court challenge to the proposed law allowing councillors to defect to other parties.
Sources said a groundswell was building among the DA’s 107 councillors in the 200-strong council to take the legislation, gazetted recently, to the Constitutional Court. Only eight councillors would have to cross the floor for the party to lose its overall majority.
However, the Democratic Party which leads the DA has consistently supported the principle of floor-crossing to allow for the expression of political conscience. Its major objection to the draft law released in December was that it would allow President Thabo Mbeki to decide when floor-crossing should take place, but this provision has been redrafted to its satisfaction.
Divisions between local government representatives and national representatives could lead to locking of horns at the DA federal congress to be held in Gauteng on April 13 and 14.
Long-standing differences between old-style liberals to whom freedom of association is one of the highest virtues and pragmatists, many drawn from the party’s new conservative constituency, could lead to conflict.
Among the main movers seeking to bend DA policy on the matter are Cape Town mayor Gerald Morkel and David Erleigh, a former New National Party representative who is a proportional list councillor and executive committee member. Asked to comment, Erleigh said he was bound by council’s confidentiality obligations.
Provincial deputy DA leader Hennie Bester, known to be close to Morkel, said: “As yet, there is nothing to take to court … but it is not impossible there may be grounds to.” Bester said the legislation had still to go through Parliament, where it might be changed.
One senior DA member said that allowing floor-crossing in the current proportional representation system would be a disaster.
“There would not be governance through democracy but by people with deep pockets,” the member said. “Say the DA wins the province by one seat in the next provincial election and the ANC offers someone an ambassadorship … Democracy would be held hostage by the least principled member.”
The New National Party has accused the DA of hypocrisy. Deputy national executive director Daryl Swanepoel said the party should make use of parliamentary opportunities to put its case rather than “mumble about challenges in the Constitutional Court before a word is uttered in Parliament”.
Swanepoel said the DP had “shouted from the hilltops” about freedom of association. Last year parliamentary chief whip Douglas Gibson backed crossing of the floor in a private member’s Bill.
“It is clear the DA is worried about what will happen on DA-controlled councils,” he said, adding that 70 of the DA’s 107 Cape Town councillors had been NNP nominees.
The NNP’s job of collapsing the DA council is made easier by a provision in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Amendment Bill that allows individual councillors elected in wards to join a new political party or become independent.
In terms of the legislation, proportional list councillors must, either on their own or with ward councillors, band together to make up 10% of their original party before they can cross the floor.
Swanepoel said that in some municipalities 10% only constituted one or two councillors. In Cape Town it constituted 11 members of the DA caucus.