Gayton McKenzie addresses followers at a PA meeting. Photo: X
The DA remains almost unchallenged in the Western Cape in its bid to continue its dominance in the province at the ballot box in 2024. But a political opponent, in the form of the Patriotic Alliance, is emerging.
The party, which is led by politician and former bank robber Gayton McKenzie, is beginning to win over voters as the ANC struggles with in-fighting.
The Western Cape is experiencing an influx of people who have left Gauteng and other provinces in search of better infrastructure and service delivery. In the DA’s provincial offices, the target is clear: 60% of the vote.
Tertius Simmers, the DA’s provincial leader, believes that, come election day, his party will win every needed vote, but with one catch — they need voters to show up at the ballot box.
“Just by the voter registration data of November, the success that we’ve been able to amass tells us that we’re on course,” Simmers said.
Under the DA’s leadership, parts of the Western Cape appear on paper to be thriving in comparison to other provinces. Earlier this year, Statistics South Africa recorded that the province had a 6.9% increase in employment, the largest in the country. Gauteng, on the other hand, experienced a -0.4% decline quarter-on-quarter.
One reason for the Western Cape’s improved employment is a result of the migration of people to the province. From 2016 to 2021, StatsSA found that 21% of people from Gauteng formed part of an exodus of about 100 000 people who moved to the Cape — and estimated that this number will increase to 24% from 2021 to 2026.
At the heart of it all, are reports in Gauteng of broken water infrastructure, potholed roads, broken traffic lights and, of course, the hours of load-shedding. In recent months, the City of Johannesburg has seen a revolving door of mayors and the metro’s finances are in dire straits. As Gauteng’s reputation for service delivery seemingly worsens, the DA is enjoying its successes in the Western Cape, which is the only province that received a clean audit from the auditor general.
Keith Gottschalk, a political scientist at the University of the Western Cape, argues that Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis’ rise to power has strengthened the DA’s position in the province in areas where voters can see the benefits of its leadership.
“The DA lead in the Western Cape is so huge that the most significant political change in a decade was not inter-party rivalry, but the palace coup inside the DA when Geordin Hill-Lewis deposed the [mediocre] Dan Plato as mayor, and brought in a new team of leadership,” he says. “This made a dramatic improvement to the water and sewage crises around the Cape Peninsula — he increased that budget by 600%.”
The DA’s successes are limited, however. In a speech in November, the party’s leader, John Steenhuisen, acknowledged that the DA had fallen short in its delivery of services to poorer areas.
“But we are also honest that we have a lot more to do,” Steenhuisen said. “This province is making enormous progress, but it is not perfect.”
The province continues to battle with a housing shortage and to overcome apartheid spatial planning, which sees much of its population living in poverty-stricken conditions with fewer basic resources and far from work opportunities.
According to land justice activists at the nonprofit organisation, Ndifuna Ukwazi, in the City of Cape Town there is a housing shortfall, with more 350 000 people on the housing list. When state-subsidised homes are built, they are on the margins of the city, creating “poverty-traps”, Ndifuna Ukwazi says.
It is within this gap that the Patriotic Alliance (PA) is pushing to find sympathetic voters, particularly as the ANC continues to face dwindling support.
The Patriotic Alliance factor
The PA has been controversial since its inception in 2013 when it was co-founded by convicted fraudster Kenny Kunene and McKenzie. The party has made inroads in the Western Cape in recent years, winning by-elections in the Garden Route, the Swartland local municipality, and in the Cape Town metro when the DA failed to put a candidate forward for election.
The ANC this year held its first provincial elective conference in more than six years, and its new leadership is grappling with factionalism that the party says is more dire than its financial record. In June, the party’s interim committee convener, Lerumo Kalako, presented the findings of the party’s political report at the ANC’s provincial elective conference.
“The state of the organisation and the dire situation of our finances were not as devastating to the political programme as the highest levels of factionalism in the province,” he said.
While the ANC’s new Western Cape leader, Vuyiso Tyhalisisu, has committed himself to resolving the divisions in the party’s provincial structures, the PA has stepped in to capitalise on the ANC’s losses, winning by-election votes.
This has not gone unnoticed by the DA, which is aware that even if the PA doesn’t pose a direct threat to the party’s dominance in 2024, it may increase its support to become a challenger in later elections.
Simmers said the DA had been paying attention to both the PA and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in the run-up to the 2024 elections.
“We are awfully aware that the PA and EFF are fishing in the same pond as the ANC because there are various coalition governments where they govern together in the Western Cape which have been a total failure,” he said.
“The PA is focused on the biggest component of the population of the Western Cape which is the coloured community,” he added.
The PA’s election race
Earlier this year, election monitoring expert Wayne Sussman told News24 that the PA has increased its support base because it has focused on campaigning among coloured populations in South Africa.
“In the 2019 and 2021 elections, we saw identity become an issue in elections, and South Africans were looking inwards,” Sussman said. “The PA gave coloured people a voice and identity, just like the IFP [Inkatha Freedom Party] did with Zulu voters in KwaZulu–Natal.”
Although the PA has said that its voter majority is in areas with a big population of coloured people, McKenzie has denied that the party has used race to win votes.
“We have many black representatives, from our deputy president, Kenny Kunene, and the head of our youth league. We are the only party that has all races in the top seven. Now, how can you say we are a racist party?” McKenzie asked News24 in October.
The PA now has its target set on increasing its power in the Western Cape, with McKenzie saying the party is campaigning in areas “where people have been misled by the DA and left behind, especially in Gugulethu and Mitchells Plain”.
The party is not without controversy, however. In April, McKenzie faced anger from medical professionals and the South African Human Rights Commission after he made xenophobic comments in 2022 about medical treatment for non-South Africans during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I would unplug that gas that they were enjoying from South Africa, and I would bring somebody from South Africa, and I would connect them to the gas. If they must die they must die,” he said in August 2022.
After receiving a letter from the Human Rights Commission, McKenzie’s spokesperson, Steve Motale, told News24 that the PA would not back down on its comments.
“I can confirm that the president has not responded to the commission as we in the PA are uncompromising and unwavering in our stance to put South Africans first,” he said.
In addition, McKenzie and Kunene were referred to as the “new Guptas” after their proposed involvement in a multibillion rand gas deal was reported in the news in 2017.
The two are also associates of former president Jacob Zuma.
While the party is emerging as the DA’s new opponent in the Western Cape, the DA is hoping that its oldest foe can finally be put to rest.
“The ANC has been in decline over the past few years in the province, and we have a comical saying in the legislature that we need to finally have a funeral for the ANC and get it done and dusted. We do believe 2024 will be that moment,” Simmers said.