Premium: SA politics becomes “anyone but ANC”, smaller parties support lesser evils

There was much about yesterday's political drama to remind us of the ANC's destructive electoral conference at Polokwane in 2007. At the event which started began the once impregnable party's slide, delegates rallied under an "anyone by Mbeki" banner. This resulted in the elevation of incompetent and corrupt Jacob Zuma – and SA's nine long years of misrule.

Last night, SA smaller political parties adopted an "anyone but ANC" approach. In Johannesburg Herman Mashaba's ActionSA and his sometime allies of the EFF voted against the ANC's candidates, handing the country's largest city's mayoral chain to the Democratic Alliance. Ditto in Ekurhuleni, the industrial hub to the east. Tshwane is likely to go the same way today.

While that blindsided the previously confident ANC, a far bigger surprise was Zulu-nationalist party Inkatha reneging on a well publicised pact with the ruling party. With the DA's support (and sometimes the EFF's), the IFP took control a number of municipalities in KZN, among them my beleaguered boyhood town of Newcastle. This morning the opposition is poised to repeat this in the biggest of them all, eThekwini.

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