JAUNDICED EYE
Maimane wins a chalice at SA’s local government Olympics
After weeks of arm wrestling, marathon negotiations, and vaulting ambition, the first round of South Africa’s local government Olympics draws to a close. Now comes the really tough part, complete with mudslinging and backstabbing, as sworn foes try to nudge one another aside, jostling to retain a toehold on the winner’s podium.
Coalitions — whether they are formal ones such as that which has handed Nelson Mandela Bay to the Democratic Alliance or ad hoc ones that in theory will enable it to govern Tshwane, Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni — are difficult creatures to control. As former DA leader Helen Zille warns ruefully, in response to party stalwarts pointing at the DA’s coalition successes in Cape Town in 2006 to 2011, their party has been in far more failed coalitions than successful ones.
Zille goes further. She will have infuriated the new party leadership, speaking out as she did while it was negotiating with the Economic Freedom Fighters and an array of hitherto insignificant parties, by warning against coalitions where there is no outright winner, since such arrangements are “doomed to fail”.
Although it remained understandably unsaid by Zille — who had brokered the deal — DA coalitionists merely need to think back a couple of years to one of the more memorable political failures in SA history, the DA link-up with Agang. That one didn’t even see out the week of its razzmatazz launch.
Zille's warnings will go unheeded. The euphoria of imminent power is intoxicating.
In all of this horse trading, EFF leader Julius Malema has again shown his tactical genius. The EFF won’t enter into any formal coalition but it will not, at least initially, vote against the DA in the minority-government metros, thus effectively denying the ANC the opportunity to govern.
So Malema screws it to the African National Congress for not dumping President Jacob Zuma, as demanded by the EFF, while “ not getting into bed with the better devil” of the DA, as he evocatively describes it. Consequently, Malema keeps his hands ideologically clean, which is important to his hardline supporters, while nevertheless keeping them firmly on the levers of power.
Malema is running rings around his opponents. And all the time while playing the media like a fiddle.
This week's EFF briefing on its coalition plans was held under an awning in the dusty veld overlooking the shanties of Alex. The EFF banner backdrop that initially hung behind the speakers was removed to accommodate the television crews, driving home the choice of this particular spot on every newscast.
The equivalent DA press conference was held in a Sandton hotel. Or as more than one journalist promptly described it as, a “swish”, “swanky” and “upmarket” hotel, drawing an obliging and naive contrast of the salt of the earth EFF versus the effete, out-of-touch DA agents of monopoly capital.
Malema leaves DA leader Mmusi Maimane looking flat-footed and clumsy. It’s a bit like watching two swordsmen, one armed with a rapier, the other with a cricket bat. The latter may well eventually strike an incapacitating blow, but only if he doesn’t bleed out first.
For example, at some stage before the elections, the DA leader had met with former president Thabo Mbeki at his home. This was never announced, no press release was issued, no one but they know what transpired. Admirable and statesmanlike, but of zero propaganda value.
Some time later Julius Malema trekked up the same garden path. Unlike Maimane, he milked it for every ounce of publicity, with pictures of the two former sworn enemies chuckling chummily over the bone china teacups.
This is all politically transparent stuff but an uncritical public swallows it whole, exactly as it is served up by a largely gullible media that treats Malema less as a politician to be interrogated than as a celebrity to be promoted. It’s a problem, also, because neither the ANC nor the DA appears to comprehend the ruthlessness of Malema, as well as his indifference to the political niceties, such as confidentiality, that they subscribe to.
After that tea with Mbeki, Malema went on to proclaim to the assembled media that he was “confident” from the discussions with Mbeki, that the former president would be voting EFF. Crass and highly improbable, but effective politicking nevertheless.
In similar vein, Business Day political editor Natasha Marrian describes how Maimane at the DA press conference “waffled” through an answer to a question about DA willingness to remove Die Stem from the national anthem, one of Malema’s non-negotiable demands for coalition.
Malema earlier had told journalists that Maimane had agreed with this and had confided that having Die Stem in the anthem was “like having Jewish people singing Nazi songs”. Maimane, says Marrian, “issued a thin denial. It was an awkward moment”. Indeed, for if what Malema says is true, it shows Maimane to be a weak, duplicitous gatkruiper.
While Maimane and his supporters are understandably delighted at the DA’s potentially game-changing successes, the ease at which the EFF has bested them in the post-electoral negotiations should be a matter of concern. Whether the DA has been handed a poisoned chalice remains to be seen, for based on its record, the EFF has no intention of allowing the DA to rule effectively, whatever it might say at this moment.
And then the DA still has to confront the reaction of the ANC, which at moment like a wounded beast is closeted in its lair, licking its wounds. When it emerges, it will be to deploy every mechanism that a powerful government has readily at its fingertips — national budgets, the public service, the power of legislation and demarcation — to reclaim the control that it believes is rightly theirs.
Bring at least a sabre, Mr Maimane. No, no. Not the movie one.
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