New African National Congress Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool has pledged to lobby national government to review the system of political defections — also known as party jumping between elections — which he believes the electorate views with distaste.
At the Cape Town Press Club, Rasool was asked whether he was not concerned about instability in the Cape Town city council — which like municipalities around the country will see another floor-crossing period in September — and the provincial government in the Western Cape next year.
”We are going to work very hard that no instability [occurs] when the window opens again in September. It will take a lot of political work. If I can lobby national government successfully, we should close off the legislation.”
”The voters have expressed quite a lot of disaffection which they see as cynical piece of legislation.”
Rasool was candid about preventing instability in the context of the ”difficulties that the New National Party is going through” — referring to its poor showing nationwide and much reduced performance in its traditional Western Cape base.
The NNP has a working arrangement with the ANC and co- rules at provincial and Cape Town City council level.
It was important that upcoming defections did not translate into an unstable situation in Cape Town, he said, noting that the African National Congress-led administration in the city, which included a NNP component, were beginning to deliver ”and that we need to be encouraging [stability]”.
In 2002 after the last municipal floor-crossing period, a body of New National Party councillors then within the Democratic Alliance returned to their original party — enough to give the ANC/NNP alliance a majority on the 200-seat council of 12.
The DA mayor, Gerald Morkel, was replaced by the ANC’s Nomaindia Mfeteko with the NNP’s Pierre Uys becoming deputy Mayor.
Uys, however, has moved to become provincial minister of Health in Rasool’s new administration and he has been replaced by the NNP’s Gawa Samuels.
The ANC is concerned that with the poor performance of the NNP in the recent election, NNP councillors will wish to cross to parties where they would get re-elected. Movement either to the ANC or the DA — or even the Independent Democrats — appears inevitable.
At the moment the council breakdown is 80 seats for the African National Congress, 71 for the Democratic Alliance and 32 for the New National Party with smaller parties making up the remainder.
Anthea Serritslev, a DA whip on the council, said it was difficult to say whether the NNP councillors would cross back to the DA in September and she believed they would not be encouraged to do so — as the DA had workers in the field who would like to run for the municipal wards in the city in next year’s municipal election. She noted that the DA had won the bulk of the areas where the NNP ward councillors hailed from in the recent national and provincial election.
However, she acknowledged that the next municipal election would be a tight race — as the ANC had emerged in the national and provincial election with 44,09% in Cape Town followed by the DA with 27,2% and Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats with 8,3%. The National Party did only slightly better than De Lille with 10,83%.
At present, De Lille — who herself defected from the Pan Africanist Congress in Parliament — is not represented on the Cape Town city council but her party may well be seen as a home for some of the NNP councillors who don’t find it comfortable to be in the ANC.
ID chief of staff Brent Meersman said: ”We have accepted that crossing of the floor is a reality of South African politics. The caucus accepted in principle that it would accept people who have crossed to the ID with only a serious vetting process. Only people who endorse our stand on all issues.” – I-Net Bridge