The recent election has shown politicians who desert their parties during the floor-crossing window periods invariably lose out, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said on Friday.
Writing in his weekly newsletter on the DA’s website, Leon said the biggest losers of the recent municipal election were the floor-crossers.
”Throughout South Africa, opposition councillors who joined the African National Congress were soundly defeated in their wards.
”Those few who kept their jobs did so solely by virtue of their positions on ANC [African National Congress] proportional representation lists,” he said.
In Cape Town, not a single New National Party (NNP) ward councillor who crossed the floor to the ANC kept his or her ward. This included the NNP/ANC deputy mayor Gawa Samuels, who was resoundingly defeated in her own ward by the DA’s Wilma Brady.
The same was true of Paarl, Knysna and many other councils across the Western Cape, where floor-crossing had done the most damage.
While the vast number of ”hung councils” in the province was a sign that the Independent Democrats had split the opposition, it was equally a sign that the majorities that the ANC had built through floor-crossing in 2002 and 2004 were entirely illusory.
In one particularly egregious example, councillor Koos Bredenhand, who crossed the floor in Cape Town, won only 2% of the vote in his ward, while his rival from the DA, Danetta Smit, won 87% of the vote.
Bredenhand blamed his loss on ”racism”, and could not bring himself to face the truth that the voters had rejected him, his new party and, most of all, the discredited floor-crossing system.
A survey among Cape Town voters in February by an independent research company had revealed that 73% were going to vote against ”crosstitutes”.
”The fact that they have now done so is a clear indication that floor-crossing must come to an end,” Leon said. ”In the coming weeks, I will invite the DA to take a harsher stance against floor-crossing than ever before.
”I will also lead a fight at the national level to make floor-crossing illegal and will invite voters to participate in a campaign to end floor-crossing for good.”
De Lille ‘lost credibility’
Leon also said Independent Democrats leader Patricia de Lille not only lost ”power” but credibility as well in the race for the Cape Town metro governance.
”Patricia de Lille and the ANC should have read their Shakespeare before coming to the Cape Town city council chamber on Wednesday,” he said. ”The Ides of March is not traditionally a good day for incumbents.
”This time, however, it was democracy, and not treachery, that ended the reign of Nomaindia Mfeketo and put the DA’s Helen Zille in the mayor’s seat.”
Zille’s victory was one of the most exciting political episodes in recent South African history, he said.
There was, first of all, the drama of the day itself, when the ”smug predictions” of the ANC and ID were overturned, Leon said, by the surprise revelation of an eleventh-hour coalition forged by the DA and the smaller parties.
Then there was the fact that the new coalition brought so many different parties together — liberal and religious, Afrikaans-speaking and Xhosa-speaking, Muslim and Christian. They had a common purpose of building a new and better Cape Town, and ending corruption and bringing real service delivery to the city’s people.
Leon said the outcome of the city-council vote was never a certain thing. ”But two factors in the preceding days convinced many smaller parties that an ANC-ID coalition had to be prevented from taking power in Cape Town.”
The first was the ANC’s decision to renominate Mfeketo as its mayoral candidate.
Most Capetonians had been led to believe, according to Leon, that whether the ANC took control or not, Mfeketo would be ”redeployed” away from a post where she had clearly underperformed.
The ANC’s poor showing at the polls in Cape Town had sent a strong signal that the people wanted a change of administration, Leon said.
But when the ANC ”refused to listen”, many people and parties that previously might have been willing to tolerate five more years of ANC rule began to reconsider.
ID leader Patricia de Lille had been on record saying ”we are not going to back Nomaindia for mayor and that is non-negotiable”.
However, she then decided to vote in support of Mfeketo’s bid to retain the mayoralty.
”This kind of behaviour does terrible damage — not only to herself, but to all politicians.
”Unfortunately for her, and fortunately for the voters, De Lille was not actually the ‘kingmaker’ in Cape Town, because she failed to win enough votes to be able to give either the ANC or the DA a majority.
”Now that she has broken her promise to remain independent, and failed at the same time to put Mfeketo back in power, De Lille has not only lost power but credibility as well,” Leon said. — Sapa