Kingmaker EFF turns back on ANC

The Economic Freedom Fighters party (EFF), predicted to be the kingmaker after the 3 August local government elections, lived up to the tag when they announced a commitment to back the Democratic Alliance (DA) – a decision which could herald change in the country’s political landscape.

The party committed itself to vote with the DA and other smaller parties to shut out the African National Congress (ANC) in hung municipalities.

Though the consequences to the tenuous pact are still to unfold, the EFF president Julius Malema, said this strategy will weaken and eventually usurp power from the ANC. He accused the ANC of arrogance, corruption, cronyism, insensitivity, overbearing and bloated bureaucracy said to impact on the national purse, denying badly needed service delivery to desperate and poor communities. “We want to punish them for their kleptocracy,” Malema said.

He stated that the ANC had its chance to form a pact but rebuffed it by refusing the EFF’s conditions – one of which was to remove President Jacob Zuma. He said the latter cost the ANC the elections due to his corrupt tendencies, including the over-spending of public funds at his Nkandla home, which was condemned by the Constitutional Court.

Malema also mentioned Zuma’s association with and influence by the Gupta family which, he said, has deepened corruption and the patronage system in every sector of government, and consolidated State capture by the family which will eventually bankrupt the country. The capture, he said, has turned ministers and heads of parastatals into benefactors and beneficiaries of the family through financial rewards.

“The pact is the beginning to getting the ANC, which is self-destructing on its positive brand, out of power, as its leaders choose to protect Zuma whose controversies also include the unresolved killings of miners in Marikana and the killings by ANC members of EFF members in Nkomazi, Mpumalanga and Tembisa during the elections.”

He said the pact would see the DA running Tswane, the seat of government; Joburg and Nelson Mandela metros, the Forum for Service Delivery in Rustenburg and, the IFP and the Civic Organisation in areas they required additional votes to head councils. This, he said, would also strengthen democratic centralism with opposition parties running Tswane, and Nkandla, the home of the president.

Malema warned that the EFF’s votes came with conditions, including a demand to scrutinise budgets to ensure a commitment to tangible service delivery – like specific allocations for relocating Setswetla Informal Settlement residents in Alexandra to proper housing and the fencing off of the area to avoid re-occupation.

Malema couldn’t rule out an ANC fightback which he anticipates through calls for re-elections, vote buying through distribution of food parcels and T-shirts and the coercion of opposition party members to defect to it.