Senior members of the Pan Africanist Congress recently advised their president, Stanley Mogoba, to dump Patricia de Lille as an MP because they claimed to know of her plans to leave the party and venture out on her own.
But Mogoba overruled members of the national executive council after De Lille assured him she would not leave her political home of more than 27 years.
The party is now minus its chief whip and one of its three seats.
When the firebrand MP announced her new party, the Independent Democrats, her former PAC colleagues sent an unusually subtle, but damning, reprimand: “The PAC notes that lives were lost so that its leaders could take up their seats in Parliament,” was the official reaction.
It was a clear reference to the chief bodyguard murdered in 1994 while protecting De Lille and other PAC members who wanted to contest the first democratic election.
The carefully worded PAC reaction was issued after tough, behind-the-scenes debates on how to respond.
Many believe De Lille created a public profile for herself, but failed to translate this into votes for the party. It is understood some senior members favoured harsh words, but argument for a more measured response won.
So the party pointedly said it was disappointed that De Lille had used the floor-crossing window: “Comrade Pat led the PAC’s opposition — all the way to the Constitutional Court — to the very defection legislation that she now seeks to use to deprive the PAC of one of its seats in Parliament.”
“There’s a misperception that Patricia was a vote puller for the PAC. In the 1994 and in 1999 elections she stood as premier of the Western Cape, but didn’t get any votes,” said Maxwell Nemadzhivhanani, the PAC’s Limpopo chairperson. “She went into Parliament at the mercy of other people in the party. Maybe it’s good that she stands alone now.”
Thami ka Plaatjie, the PAC’s secretary general, seemed pleased that De Lille was out of the way: “We will be more coherent and focused. She’s been a political misfit, contradicting PAC principles. She appeals more to wild liberal sentiments than to African grassroots sentiments. Her departure is the culmination of a political identity crisis on her part.”
Ka Plaatjie said that friends of hers might follow her lead, but no structures would. “PAC supporters follow principles and not personalities.”
Mogoba is likely to bear the blame for not acting after being told of De Lille’s plan. Some suspect he might follow the woman he had protected since rumours about her plans to leave the PAC spread within the party weeks before the news that she had declared the PAC to be dead. Members say his chances of being re-elected as president at the party’s congress in June look bleak.
De Lille aims for an effective, principled political voice removed from the current “Chihuahua style” of opposition. Her Independent Democrats will be formally launched within two months. Regulations require it to be registered within four months after the defection window closes at midnight on April 3. All it takes is R500 and 50 signatures.
“I don’t have millions of rand, but we have enough resources to begin with,” De Lille smiled. It is understood that influential people, including an investment banker, are raising funds.