Hellen Zille says national state of disaster is to maintain centralised power. Picture: Neil McCartney
In South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, the Democratic Party (DP), the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) predecessor, only managed to get seven seats, while the National Party (NP) that had kept apartheid in place for decades, got 82 seats (21%).
Three years later, the NP had morphed into the New National Party, which a lot of South Africans seem to have forgotten went into a coalition with the ANC.
There is indeed nothing new under the sun. Jacob Zuma was part of the ANC that swallowed up its old enemy, the NP.
In fact, as president in 2009, Zuma nominated the last leader of the NP, Martinus van Schalkwyk, to head a United Nations committee on climate change.
The DA has since managed to turn the DP’s 1.7% in ’94 to a 21% in 2024, with several Cabinet positions to boot (still to be announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa).
Love or hate their politics, the DA has written the handbook, How To Be An Effective Opposition Party.
The focal point now might be Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party and its potential to halt the newly formed government of national unity (GNU) in its tracks.
But if the MK’s tardiness in its failed negotiations to form a government in KwaZulu-Natal are anything to go by, the DA is potentially the biggest winner in the recent elections.
They have positioned themselves as potential watchdogs over an ANC government that has failed to create effective mechanisms to rein in corruption and deliver sustainable progress to their electorate.
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The DA, Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), MK and even the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) all wanted the ANC to drop below 50% of the national vote but it would seem only the DA Tuesday 10 18 June 2024 (and the IFP to some extent) had sufficiently prepared themselves for what to do when that happened.
They seemed to know that “everyone hates the DA” and would not go into a meaningful post-election partnership with them, as they had discovered through the squabbles in the moonshot pact, and they decided to do the only logical thing available to them: grab themselves some power.
And if anything can be learnt from their handbook on opposition politics, the DA maintains or grows any power it attains.
Lessons for the EFF (and MK, if they get themselves together) are that a party does not always need to grow numerically to grow its power base and that growth as an opposition party only happens when a party is not afraid to govern.
When the DA won the city of Cape Town, it built its capacity to govern, which it then translated into running the Western Cape when it eventually won the province.
It has since grown such an appetite for power that it is poised to take over several metros as suggested by its growth in this election.
The EFF had 13% of the national vote previously, but failed to negotiate and turn that into even just one municipality that it governs outright.
Even newcomers the Patriotic Alliance (PA) went and served time in the deserts of the Northern Cape just to prove its ability to govern – a leaf straight out of the DA’s opposition politics handbook.
If the MK party does not get its act together and stop dreaming of an imaginary two-thirds majority victory, or threatening to “submit or fight”, they will suffer the same fate suffered by the NP after getting 21% in ’94: disappearing into nothingness.
It had the chance to govern KZN, a chance the DA would have grabbed, but it slept on the opportunity.
NOW READ: A unified SA government? Done and dusted this week…the ANC thinks so
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