WSM: No more kicking the can: CR’s moment of truth after the ANC’s metro thrashing

Cyril Ramaphosa inherited an ANC with 62% of the vote. Last week’s local elections handed it 31%. Now the master of procrastination has a fortnight to stitch together coalitions in seven hung metros that generate close to half the country’s GDP. In his Jaundiced Eye column, William Saunderson-Meyer argues the choice is wider than who fills (or not) the potholes. Partner with the DA, or patch together MK, the EFF and friends? It’s a decision about the ANC’s direction, its 2029 prospects and Ramaphosa’s legacy. And from tiny uMngeni comes a lesson in what happens when someone actually fixes the streetlights..Jaundiced Eye by William Saunderson-Meyer.No place to hide for RamaphosaLast week's local government elections (LGEs) set the stage for the 2029 national elections and are a curtain-raiser to next year's ANC leadership contest. For President Cyril Ramaphosa, they usher in potentially the most consequential phase of a presidency characterised by hesitation, missed opportunities and failure.This time, his signature response to crisis — kicking the can down the road — will not work. Coalition negotiations in roughly 140 hung municipalities, most crucially in seven of the eight metros that are home to almost a third of South Africans and generate close to half of the country's GDP, must be completed within a fortnight. There is no room for procrastination, especially for a president who inherited an ANC that had won 62% of the vote in the 2014 national election but has since presided over its reduction to a pitiful wreck, apparently locked into an arc of terminal decline, attracting just 31% in the LGEs.The ANC’s decline has been so precipitous, and Ramaphosa’s passivity so notorious, that reporting on the coalition negotiations has revolved overwhelmingly around whom the other parties — the DA (25%), MK (10%), EFF (6%), ActionSA (6%) and IFP (5%) — might embrace or shun as dancing partners. It is as though the ANC has been reduced to being the shunned wallflower at its own ball, its wishes and antipathies of no consequence.It is, of course, true that the ANC is negotiating from a much weaker position than when it assembled the Government of National Unity (GNU) in 2024. Then, it had 40% of the vote against the DA’s 22%. That 18 percentage-point advantage has now shrunk to just six. The ANC’s diminished status is reflected in the scale of the thrashing it has taken in the all-important metros. It trails the DA in Johannesburg (20% to 35%), Ekurhuleni (22% to 31%), Nelson Mandela Bay (25% to 44%) and Cape Town (14% to 56%). In eThekwini, it is a distant third behind MK and the DA (38% to 25% to 16%); in Tshwane it likewise trails the DA and ActionSA (34% to 22% to 20%). In Mangaung, it squeaked past the DA (34% to 33%), salvaging some pride only in Buffalo City, where it easily led the UDM and DA (42% to 18% to 17%).The implications of the LGE carnage extend beyond loss of municipal control and, with it, the power of patronage. Unless the decline is arrested, the ANC faces the prospect of emerging from the 2029 national elections shut out of power in the three most economically important provinces — Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape — and increasingly relegated to South Africa's rural margins. The coalition manoeuvring now underway may keep the ANC in office, but it will not restore the party's standing with an alienated electorate. That will require an ANC capable of governing competently, delivering services efficiently and rooting out the corruption for which it has become a byword..Read more:.ANC faces NMB election collapse, clings to Buffalo City.Whether this is possible depends on whom the ANC links up with. A real challenge facing Ramaphosa is the ANC's unresolved ideological divide between hardline socialists and reformists whose commitment to a market-driven economy is, at best, lukewarm. The LGEs suggest that an entire political tradition, rooted in the cherished but impracticable socialist dreams of the Freedom Charter, adopted at the 1955 Congress of the People, may finally be losing its emotional grip on black voters. It is not simply that voters are deserting to the ANC's ideological offspring. Increasingly, they are exiting the Congress clan altogether.The numbers are startling. Even if the ANC and its breakaway parties and ideologically inbred cousins in MK, EFF, SACP and UDM were cobbled together into a Doomsday Coalition, their combined national share of the municipal vote would still be shy of 50%. It is an astonishing situation for a political dynasty that has, in every national election since 1994, collectively commanded more than 60% of the vote — most recently almost 65% in 2024. For Ramaphosa, the question is therefore not simply which parties the ANC should govern with, but which political and economic direction the party must embrace if it hopes to reverse its decline.If the ANC resists the temptation to try to put the socialist Humpty Dumpty back together again, its simplest solution, arithmetically, is to replicate at municipal level its de facto coalition with the DA in the GNU. Such an arrangement would also reassure the corporate sector and international markets and, opinion surveys show, is overwhelmingly favoured — no matter how the electorate is sliced and diced — by supporters of both the ANC and DA, as well as black voters and the electorate as a whole. At a stroke, ANC–DA administrations could take control of six of the seven hung metros, with eThekwini as the exception.The downside is twofold. First, the Gauteng ANC under Premier Panyaza Lesufi is implacably opposed to any arrangement with the DA, preferring MK and EFF, and in 2024 resisted pressure from Luthuli House to replicate the GNU at provincial level. Second, the DA's impressive performance in the metros disguises a rather stolid national picture. The DA is capturing only a modest share of the support draining from the ANC, with much of the rest scattering to MK, ActionSA and a swarm of smaller parties. ActionSA has made particularly impressive gains in Gauteng's townships, where its opposition to illegal immigration has a receptive audience. Nationally, the DA is up only three percentage points on its 22% showing in the 2021 LGEs, but remains below its 2016 high-water mark of 27%, when it attracted more than eight million ward and proportional-representation votes. This time it received almost 700,000 fewer votes.However, perhaps the most instructive DA result in these LGEs came not from the great metros but from the small, largely rural KwaZulu-Natal municipality of uMngeni, centred on Howick. It offers a case study in how competent governance, rather than ideological posturing, can translate into electoral support.In 2021, the DA wrested uMngeni from the ANC by the skin of its teeth. Just 42 votes secured it a one-seat majority in the 25-seat council. Its new mayor, Chris Pappas, was an unlikely political pioneer: a young, white, openly gay man taking charge of a municipality in a socially conservative area where roughly two-thirds of the residents are black. Fluent in isiZulu, he set about winning the confidence of communities long neglected by the ANC. It was no easy task. In December 2023, the DA’s municipal chief whip, Nhlalayenza Ndlovu, was assassinated at his home in front of his wife and children. Pappas himself faced death threats and, for a long while, had to move repeatedly between houses to avoid becoming a target. Violent protests were stirred up against the municipality’s insistence that residents, apart from the indigent, pay for the services they received.But Pappas and his team concentrated on the basics. The municipality paid off its outstanding loans, secured successive unqualified audits, increased its annual roads budget from R11 million to R42 million, installed more than 3,000 LED streetlights and tackled the massive electricity losses that had been draining its finances. Although serious shortcomings remain, the emphasis continues to be on practical, incremental improvements rather than grand promises.Last week’s electoral verdict was unequivocal. The DA's share of the proportional-representation vote leapt from 48% to 63%. It captured 10 of the 13 geographical wards, against just five in 2021, taking five from the ANC in predominantly black townships. Its council representation grew from 13 to 15 seats, with MK taking five and the ANC reduced to just four. For a party struggling nationally to break through racial barriers to electoral growth, uMngeni offers a striking demonstration of what happens when voters see tangible evidence that a change of government can improve their daily lives.Ramaphosa, of course, does not have to strike a deal with the DA, nor it with the ANC. There are other routes to coalition control, but almost invariably these involve patching together several parties, each with its own ambitions, antagonisms and baggage. .Read more:.Corrigan: "Vibes Politics": Why SA voters keep choosing charm over competence.MK is organisationally chaotic, a personality cult built around Jacob Zuma, steeped in the ethos of his state-capture presidency and fuelled by ethnic grievance and revenge. The IFP, like MK, is largely confined to KwaZulu-Natal, its politics rooted in Zulu nationalism. ActionSA is similarly dominated by its founder, the mercurial and combative Herman Mashaba, whose personal feuds and strident stance on illegal immigration complicate any accommodation. And then there is the EFF under an increasingly isolated Julius Malema, whose revolutionary posturing and Che Guevara pretensions have proved more enduring than his party's waning electoral appeal.It is a momentous decision for Ramaphosa. It’s not simply about who governs South Africa's municipalities for the next five years, but about the ANC's ideological direction, its prospects in 2029 and, ultimately, the legacy of his presidency. Not to mention the future of South Africa..Follow WSM on X @TheJaundicedEye.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. 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WSM: No more kicking the can: CR’s moment of truth after the ANC’s metro thrashing

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