A VIEW OF THE WEEK: From the Brink of oblivion, the ANC keeps rising to power

“One city cannot be held to ransom by a party that doesn’t even have a majority in council,” came the angry cry from a listener on a local radio station.

The caller was making the point about the DA’s lack of support to keep former Tshwane mayor Cilliers Brink in office, but this is more true of those who joined together to kick him out.

The DA ran Tshwane through a coalition government from 2016, with Brink as mayor since March last year.

Can’t admit failure

While there has been a crippling salary dispute and serious service delivery issues over the past few years, including a water and humanitarian crisis in Hammanskraal, Brink has overseen some steady progress.

In March, the city improved its audit outcomes from adverse to qualified, signalling a move in the right direction.

So, it was interesting that one of the partners that helped manage the City, and shared in its successes and failures, would be the one to open the backdoor to parties like the ANC and EFF when they did not threaten its coalition.

When questioned about it, Mashaba could not say the City had deteriorated under Brink, because doing so would be admitting his party’s own failure. Instead, he spoke petty politics about a broken relationship between the two parties.

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He had sacrificed putting citizens first for personal scores and political positions. Nowhere is this clearer than in the decision to remove Brink without finalising his successor, leaving the City in a 14-day limbo.

Importantly, he had finally repaid the ANC for giving his party the Speaker of Council position in Johannesburg.

The king behind the kingmaker

Voters choose their political home based on what those parties promise to do, and not do, but politicians often use it as a licence to do what they want with impunity. It was paraded for all to see during the disastrous floor-crossing era and is revived under shady coalitions.

In these cold and dark marriages of convenience, the ANC thrives to regain or retain power. It often creates “kingmakers” of potential coalition partners, only to take the crown itself.

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Politics is a living mirror of distortion, where perception is more important than reality. As masters of the mirrors, the ANC sent their national leadership to meet with their provincial structures, and for at least the third time in months, it failed to align its provincial and national strategies.

Negotiations with the DA also failed.

These failures are no doubt convenient for ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula who is known to side with those who will promise him political survival and may have seen Premier Panyaza Lesufi as that force post the 2027 ANC elective conference.

It may no longer have complete power nationally, but the ANC has shown, with its varying factions, that its tentacles can reach for power whenever the opportunity arises.

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