I knew the African National Congress was not going to win Cape Town in the March 1 local government election when I heard that mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo had hurriedly extended the contract of city manager Wallace Mgoqi shortly before election day. It reminded me of the dying days of the second Clinton administration, when Bill Clinton used his last hour in office to grant presidential pardons to a series of crooked chums.
But the incident last Saturday when Cape Town mayor Helen Zille was chased away from a meeting in Crossroads has provided an even more serious distraction. The national government’s response was commendably unequivocal: the behaviour of the people who disrupted the meeting and threw chairs at Zille was wrong and totally unacceptable.
That the government chose to issue the statement from Joel Netshitenzhe — head not just of the president’s policy unit, but also as head of the Government Communication and Information Service and therefore the government’s most senior spokesperson — underlined the seriousness with which the incident was being taken in the Union Buildings.
In contradistinction, the provincial ANC was lamentably equivocal, implying feebly that Zille was as much to blame. It exposed once again the strategic short-sightedness of the ANC’s provincial leadership.
Whereas Netshitenzhe is, like his boss, acutely aware of how badly such an incident will play internationally — ”opposition mayor injured by baying ANC mob” — the provincial ANC appears unconcerned about the dangers that such headlines will pose.
Zille claims that the ANC is ”in denial” about it election ”defeat”. She is wrong about this, in two ways. First, the Western Cape ANC is not in denial about the election result. It is in denial, period, and has been since 1994.
At no point has it ever constructed an adequate political strategy for the province or the city.
Moreover, it has persistently failed to develop the necessary internal cohesion that would permit it to do so. Instead, factions have fought their egotistic battles; weak leadership has allowed these fissures to fester. This, in turn, is the root cause of the ANC’s continued failure to effectively and successfully bridge the black and coloured working-class communities and, therefore, its failure to achieve a decisive electoral victory in either provincial or national elections.
The ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) regularly pulls its collective hair out over the Western Cape comrades. A number of senior NEC members have told me in recent weeks of the depth of this disillusionment and the increasing likelihood that the NEC will be compelled to step in.
Meanwhile, the fight with Zille and the precariousness of her coalition provide the ideal excuse for the ANC to avoid asking the hard questions.
The second error in Zille’s clarion call is the idea that the ANC ”lost” the election. It did not. You cannot lose an election in which there is no winner. And, though the DA and its liberal proxies such as Allister Sparks and Rhoda Kadalie have chosen to portray the party as the ”winners”, this is self-delusion of a different sort. The only way you can win an election is by achieving a majority. The DA got a plurality of the votes, but not a majority.
Hence, it is all about putting together a coalition that will give you a workable, governing, legislative majority. Inevitably, this has been hotly and ruthlessly contested. That’s politics. The problem is that there is little or no tradition of coalition-building in South Africa and no conventions or rules of the game. Places such as Germany and Israel are schooled by habit and history to deal with the exigencies of coalition-making. Despite the initial confusion, a clear governing coalition usually emerges. Perhaps the most important task ahead is to discern a set of principles for the future.
More plausibly, the DA complains that having put together its coalition, however fragile, the ANC should let it get on with governing rather than trying to dismantle it. But again, this is the nature of coalition politics and not necessarily a cause for concern in and of itself.
Evidence of the ANC defying the democratic rules of the game by deliberately obstructing the operation of government, through the acts or omissions of ”its” officials, would be cause for serious concern.
Zille hints at this, but has yet to present decisive evidence. If there is real evidence, publish it. If there is a deliberate refusal to obey a lawful instruction, summarily dismiss the official. If the ANC is behind it, prove it in the public arena and then the party must be condemned.
In the meantime, a deeply divided city faces another period of unstable government. Since 1994, it has not enjoyed more than two consecutive years of consistent government.
Totally unacceptable though it was, the Crossroads incident may remind Zille that her own integrity and record of work in the townships means very little: she is a DA mayor and the DA is regarded as a last bastion of white privilege by black, working-class communities.
The question for Zille is whether the tough-talking Godzille image she has chosen to project is likely to discourage this image and encourage the sort of cross-community trust and social cohesion that Cape Town urgently yearns for.
I very much doubt it. I thought that Zille had the potential to do things differently and so start to shape a new identity for the DA. But perhaps nowadays she is just another chip off the old Tony Leon block.