The PA paradox: why voters keep forgiving Gayton McKenzie

Gayton McKenzie didn't build the Patriotic Alliance on policy. He built it on belonging. In 2024 that won him nine seats, a Cabinet post and a firm grip on Coloured voters who felt ignored by both the ANC and the DA. His record in government tells another story. Think of Knysna's taps running dry, the Central Karoo's revival that never came, and PA-linked appointees on public boards. Ron Weissenberg asks why supporters keep forgiving it. His answer is that identity beats delivery. It's the same formula that kept the ANC in power for decades. Will the 2026 local elections finally break the spell?.By Ron Weissenberg.South African politics is a theatre of contradictions, but few acts are as intriguing to follow as the rise of Gayton McKenzie and the Patriotic Alliance (PA). As with the MK Party and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the PA’s popularity relies more on personality than performance, blending McKenzie’s charisma and ethno-nationalism into an alluring form of populism. From marginal beginnings in 2013, the PA has evolved into an influential national player, capable of making and breaking government structures.In the May 2024 general election, the PA disrupted the political establishment by securing nine seats in the National Assembly with 2.06% of the national ballot (over 330,000 votes). By capturing 8.6% in the Northern Cape and 7.5% in the Western Cape, the party directly eroded the Democratic Alliance’s long-standing dominance among Coloured voters. Central to the PA’s meteoric rise is a cult of personality. As a veteran Cape community leader said, “He [Mckenzie] was a hero, like a saviour. He helped a lot of people, did things for the communities and said he had found God after serving his prison sentence.” But more nuanced was the reluctance to be named and quoted. This was the case when people were approached for comment on this article. In urban areas, there is a palpable sense of anxiety when ordinary citizens criticise the PA or their leadership. Anonymous criticism prevents being ostracised. Direct intimidation, doxxing and digital mobbing as experienced by Caryn Dolley (an investigative journalist) and Dereleen James (an Action SA MP) have been well documented. There are repercussions when probing links between political figures, drug cartels, cadre deployment and wasteful expenditure. Yet beneath the PA’s fiery rhetoric, lies a paradox: a political machine that mobilises the grievances of its constituency, while almost completely failing them in the realities of actual governance.To understand the founding and appeal of the PA, one must look beyond contemporary race-based politics, to the arrival of the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. Within those early decades, the complex, painful origins of the Coloured identity took root. With the first recorded interracial unions dating from 1660, a distinct identity emerged from the intertwining of European settlers with the indigenous Khoi, San and enslaved peoples brought from across Africa and Asia. Since those early unions and migrations, the evolving Coloured community has endured over 350 years of systemic "othering"; classified and marginalized successively by the Dutch, the British, the architecture of Apartheid and latterly by the contradictions of Black African nationalism.The displacement of Coloured communities did not end after Apartheid either. Since the 1994 democratic order, Coloured South Africans have experienced a semi-disenfranchised reality encapsulated by the phrase: "Not white enough under apartheid, not black enough under democracy." Compounded by ongoing spatial segregation, gang violence, socio-economic challenges and systemic exclusion, many Coloured communities feel abandoned. Where traditional parties provided manifestos and promises, Gayton McKenzie’s PA offered both validation and identity. He spoke a familiar vernacular and a language of belonging that resonated in townships where ANC redistributive policies and DA liberal messaging fell flat. Despite its non-racial constitution, according to deputy president Kenny Kunene, over 90% of the 2024 PA vote came from coloured communities. While posing as a champion of the marginalized, the PA’s actual footprint in municipal and national governance has resulted in instability, growing patronage, and administrative breakdown. Taking office as District Mayor of the Central Karoo in April 2022, McKenzie promised to be a 100-day wonder, pledging to eradicate bucket toilets, fix potholes, and open factories to drive job creation while giving up his mayoral salary and vehicle. Yet the gloss quickly faded as the promised economic revival evaporated, leaving the region in ongoing stagnation. In Knysna, a coalition involving the PA, ANC, and EFF brought municipal administration to near-collapse: refuse trucks sat broken, residents endured multi-week water outages, and public health fears peaked when a decomposing body was discovered in a municipal drinking water reservoir. Infrastructure failures worsened to the point where nine of Knysna’s eleven wards were left without water, requiring emergency tankers that subsequently became targets in local political infighting.This dysfunction scaled up when the party entered the Government of National Unity in 2024. As Minister of Sports, Arts, and Culture, McKenzie’s initial 100-day wonder quickly morphed into a tenure marked by bloated travel budgets and aggressive town-renaming initiatives that have sparked tens of thousands of objections and legal challenges in Graaff-Reinet, East London and Port Alfred. Furthermore, as journalist Stuart Lowman noted in BizNews, McKenzie personally approached individuals to fill public boards, resulting in 19 PA-linked appointees across the National Film and Video Foundation, the National Library, the National Arts Council, Boxing South Africa, and several theatres.’The critical issue is not merely that a small party deploys cadres, but that it is occurring within a coalition explicitly built to end cadre deployment.’By conventional standards of political accountability, these administrative failures should alienate voters. Yet where the PA does not co-govern, polling data confirms they remains popular across the Cape provinces and Gauteng ahead of 2026 local municipal elections. The party’s resilience may also lie in its unapologetic right-wing populism. They advocate for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, the reinstatement of the death penalty, and mandatory military conscription for unemployed youth. These policies function as a psychological balm in communities with high unemployment and those terrorised by lawlessness. To a mother in Manenberg or a jobseeker in Eldorado Park, McKenzie does not sound like a crooked bureaucrat; he projects the image of a neighbourhood strongman stepping out to defend his street.Voting in South Africa is rarely a clinical evaluation of municipal audits; it functions as an emotional and demographic ballot. PA voters may support the idea of hawkish, ‘big man’ politics but also seem blinded by the reality of governance and oversight within complex statutory environments. They exhibit a cognitive dissonance like the formula that sustained the ANC for decades: conflating identity with capability. Supporters are willing to forgive administrative incompetence, overt patronage, and cadre deployment if a leader "looks like us, sounds like us, and fights for us." Voting for parties perceived as structurally white or exclusively black feels like a deeper betrayal of cultural identity. For an alienated demographic, shortcomings can be forgiven when the kingmaker is one of their own.For all its emotional resonance, the PA’s appeal is not impregnable. Beneath the party’s carefully cultivated image of strength, signs of strain due to a lack of delivering on substantive promises are beginning to show. In February 2024, when 6-year-old Joslin Smith went missing in Saldanha Bay, McKenzie promised to find the child and leave no stone unturned in apprehending the perpetrators. McKenzie then sponsored a foundation to locate missing children and assist affected families. A revealing moment came from an elderly Saldanha resident who asked why McKenzie’s promises after the disappearance of the six-year-old had produced no answers. The frustration was captured in a simple question: “Waar is die kind, dis nou al meer as twee jaar?” (“Where is the child, it’s been over two years now?”). McKenzie has also alienated figures who once validated the PA’s growing appeal. When DA MP Liam Jacobs defected to the PA in 2025, McKenzie framed the move as a symbolic homecoming. Barely a year later however, a disillusioned Jacobs returned to his former party. McKenzie’s response was revealing. Instead of letting the episode fade, he publicly rebuked Jacobs in a tone many viewed as patronising and offensive. Jacobs subsequently claimed that the PA relies on violent rhetoric, enforces cadre deployment and normalises criminal culture under the guise of community identity. The rhetoric is not restricted to even respected figures. In public settings, Mckenzie compounded has boasted to large audiences that the “white madam, Helen Zille (of the DA), had made him tea “like a servant.”Such personal attacks may energise a crowd in the moment, but they sit uneasily with communities that traditionally place value on education, dignity, and respect for elders. As a Saldanha community member (who insisted, again, on remaining anonymous) commented: “Helen Zille is old enough to be Gayton’s mother, he has no respect. He maintains that ANC and PA governing methods and strategies are strikingly similar; cadre deployment, lavish promotional spending and overpromising but under-delivering..Read more:.Hartford: Gayton McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance surge in Paarl signals coloured political awakening.In voting for a party that promises to defend their localised interests, PA supporters have inadvertently strengthened a political machine that treats oversight and integrity as secondary to transactional patronage.That paradox is unlikely to disappear through conventional campaigning alone. Opposition parties must understand that ideas have power. To dislodge the PA, they need to confront the community’s 370-year trauma and the present-day realities of the Coloured working class with authentic engagement. If they don’t, the PA is likely to keep finding fertile ground and use disruption as a tool for promoting identity politics.But for now, communities in desperate need of engineers, administrators and visible service delivery, continue to receive mostly political theatre instead..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. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

The PA paradox: why voters keep forgiving Gayton McKenzie

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