DA leader clarifies “ANC coalition” post-2024; fixing Eskom; and hope for Joburg – and South Africa
Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen shares his thoughts on a range of subjects in this interview with Alec Hogg of BizNews.com. He provides straight answers to the questions many South Africans want answered. Like: Will the DA enter a coalition with the ANC after the 2024 Election; Did Mpho Phalatse's challenge for DA Leadership trigger the end of her Joburg Mayorship; Can Eskom be rescued from seemingly inevitable collapse; After being twice let down, will the DA still strike a deal with Gayton McKenzie's Patriotic Alliance; and will his party to turn successful provincial governance into winning votes nationally. Good politicians must be peddlers of hope. From the evidence in this interview, Steenhuisen is a very good politician.
Find timestamps of the interview below:
- John Steenhuisen on an "ANC coalition" post-2024 and the tough choices lying ahead – 00:50
- On the pressure from the business community to get together with the ANC in some way – 03:15
- On whether to read much into the Sanco election of Jacob Zuma as the KZN chairman – 04:15
- On a rift within the Zulu community – 05:10
- On being a central player and guiding the DA's path – 06:50
- On whether we will know after April if the DA is prepared to go into a coalition with the ANC or not – 07:45
- On competition and "Gayton's Machieavellian fantasies" – 10:10
- On what issues voters are going to be looking at – 12:40
- On the DA's differentiating proof point – 12:55
- On what the DA is campaigning to the South African voters – 14:25
- On the "ringfence" state of disaster around Eskom – 6:50
- On fixing Eskom properly and the entire public service – 19:55
- On hope for the future of our nation – 23:15
Some extracts from the interview below:
John Steenhuisen clarifies "ANC coalition" post-2024 and the tough choices lying ahead
So I think that the comments were taken completely out of context. And let me just start by saying I've spent the majority of my adult life from my days as a councillor in Durban opposing the ANC, trying to remove them from office. So I'm not about to start the year propping the ANC up. What I did say, however, is that post 2024, working back from the nightmare scenarios for South Africa, nightmare one – ANC retains a majority, although slightly and continues along the same path. And as I said in the interview, we're going to head towards the same sort of desperation, more radicalism, more attempts to be populist. And I think that that would be dangerous for South Africa. Nightmare scenario two – if the ANC ties up and then we're on the fast track towards Venezuela, Zimbabwe, many of those other countries. We've got to see those two nightmare scenarios and work backwards from there. The point I was making is that we are going to be faced with a number of choices. We were going to have to take the least worst option, and that would be determined by where the chips fall in that election. How many votes does the opposition get? Are we able to form a voting bloc at the centre? If you currently stack the opposition party share of the vote on top of each other, it doesn't take you to 50%, even if you include the EFF. There is going to be some talk about configurations and how we get over that 51% mark, because what you don't want to be doing is like we've found ourselves in Ekurhuleni where you are governing as a minority and living from council meeting to council meeting. It's not sustainable. I also think we need to look at how we build stable coalitions. I think the worst thing for the South African economy would be to have the instability that we've seen playing out in Joburg and Tshwane and other places on a national or provincial stage. I think it will be very difficult to attract investors or get the right investor sentiment for South Africa if that instability is allowed to perpetuate. So I'll just say that what we need to do is to wait to see where the chips fall and to make the best decision for South Africa – how we build a stable government.
On the pressure from the business community to get together with the ANC in some way
No, it's to people who are wanting stability. I think the big thing for business is the uncertainty and policy uncertainty that's characterised the last decade, particularly, as we've veered between expropriation without compensation, nationalisation, prescribed assets. There's a great deal of uncertainty that a lot of businesspeople who we are looking for the most stability that they can have because the business sector needs stability in order to encourage investment, to be confident enough to invest in the economy.
"I'm not saying it would be an ANC government. I'm saying that the DA would be at the heart of an alternative government that would be able to deliver services."
On whether to read much into the Sanco election of Jacob Zuma as the KZN chairman
No, I don't think so. I think what you've got is a Sanco that's factionalized and split into two factions. The national body has distanced themselves from the KZN chapter and that decision, I don't think is a big seismic shift. There's something odd about someone being a former president and then becoming a provincial chairperson of a relatively insignificant minor body.
On whether we will know after April if the DA is prepared to go into a coalition with the ANC or not
Well, I think you'd get a set of principles that would emerge from that which we put on the table that would provide the guidance for those coalitions. What you don't want to do is to box yourself in when there may be a number of eventualities that may occur. Who knows what's going to happen in 2024? All bets are off. The only bet that's a sure bet is that the ANC are going to lose the majority. So we need to see how those chips fall. I think you'd be very foolish as a political party to box yourself in one way or another without being able to look at all the options from the vantage point of what do we do that's in the best interests of South Africa? How do we provide a stable government for South Africa? How do we help drive the reform agenda in South Africa? And that's where I think the DA's got a lot of cachet to be able to play. Born out of our experience at governing in the Western Cape, in the city of Cape Town and countless other municipalities where we've had our own majority, we've built up an expertise in government. We know what needs to be done. Turning a place like Gauteng around is not going to be much more difficult than what we were faced with when we took over the Western Cape and the city of Cape Town. So I think that what you want to do is to have a set of guiding principles that are the non-negotiables and then see how the situation develops thereafter and decide what is in the best interests of South Africa, how can we best serve citizens. It may well be that other parties come forward and form coalitions and the DA remains as the official opposition. It may well be that we supply a coalition of supply. It may well be that we go into government, but all of that is a premature discussion until we know where those chips have fallen in the '24 election and what the voters have decided they would like to see in South Africa.
On competition and "Gayton's Machieavellian fantasies"
I think it's quite ridiculous. If you take it from a logical perspective, it doesn't make much sense. Surely if you know someone's going to be an opponent of yours, you would want to keep them as busy as possible, running a very complex coalition in the city of Johannesburg. So I'm afraid for Gayton's Machiavellian fantasies. They need to remain in his head because they're not borne out by the facts. Gayton is obviously now trying to find scapegoats for his decision to hand Jo'burg over to essentially the ANC in drag and is trying to throw up red herrings. I always knew there was going to be a competitor along the line. I've never said that I was going to be uncontested. So I've been preparing myself which is why I launched my campaign in November last year. I knew there was going to be a campaign. I knew instinctively who would be standing. But it makes no sense whatsoever essentially, if that is the Machiavellian nature of your decision to essentially free up your opponent, to spend their time campaigning.
On what issues voters are going to be looking at
The issues are going to be service delivery – who can deliver the best services for me. Who can stop corruption and who can start putting me at the center of the equation. I think that's what people are going to be looking for.
On what the DA is campaigning to the South African voters
I think that many people have given up on politics as a solution to their problems. And I think we've got to rekindle that connection between using politics as an arena to solve the issues that matter to you. So there's a number of things that we've been doing. Driving issues that matter to ordinary South Africans, not the usual stuff that keeps politicians exercised at night. The cost of bone and chicken into ordinary households. That is a real issue that's affecting ordinary South Africans across the board. We're putting on the table solutions to show people that we can deliver bone and chicken cheaper to your table with the following interventions. Same with the petrol price increase. The same with social grants. All of those things would demonstrate to ordinary South Africans that politics effects all round. The big game changer is loadshedding. Loadshedding is going to be one of the major issues for the election. If I look at the president's own, very optimistic plan that he put before us, even that has loadshedding well into the second, third quarters of 2024. This is going to be an election issue, and it is a powerful issue because it has reached into the homes of every South African, regardless of colour, regardless of where they live. It has reached into their homes and the party that's leading the way and essentially out of the darkness, I think is going to be a compelling offer to put before the voters. And I think we've already started in the Western Cape and the city of Cape Town, and we can have a great story to tell in that election.
On the "ringfence" state of disaster around Eskom
So we were talking about a ringfence state of disaster around Eskom. Specifically. Part of the problem that Eskom has is around the dodgy coal contracts that they're locked into, BBBEE, which affects the ability to be able to get the cheapest and most responsive goods as quickly as possible. Employment legislation that is a bottleneck and other huge red tape. Our request was to take Eskom and exempt it from all of these red tape, onerous conditions because it is now an emergency and let us move as quickly as possible from point A of energy insecurity to point B of energy security. Allow Eskom to, without having to go through these rigorous employment advertisements, bring in experts from international companies, cut the visa regulations, make sure that you can cancel the coal contracts, which are price gouging. Bypass the procurement and the type of dodgy procurement practices that are going on within Eskom and allow Eskom's executives to be able to move forward with the energy experts to cut the deal.
On fixing Eskom properly and the entire public service
It's not just at Eskom, its entire public service. We have got one of the largest public services in the world and the most expensive. Our public service is way bigger than, if you want to use BRICS countries as a comparison, of the administrations there. And it's horribly inefficient as well. So the courage is going to have to be far greater to be able to do those retrenchments. I just read an excellent autobiography by Benjamin Netanyahu. The most important part of that book was not his time as prime minister. It was a time when he was finance minister. And if you read that chapter, the parallels between South Africa and the state owned bank, state owned industry, state owned telecoms and the breaking down of that and the getting away from that socialist bent is what triggered their growth. And they faced 6 to 8 months of rolling mass action. But they had to tough it out and you've got to have the courage to do those things. Otherwise we are all going to sink. And for the sake of 40,000 bloated employees at Eskom, it doesn't make much sense.
It's too big and too inefficient. I don't think anyone would really mind if we had such a bloated civil service if you could get a passport in two days or you didn't have to queue for an identity document at Home Affairs, or you could register for certain government services easily, but everything is a moribund mess – wherever you look. Everything the state has touched has turned into disaster. So you're going to have to have the courage to do that. And that's why a majority is going to be needed in parliament to be able to get those reforms through because it's going to be met with massive resistance from the left. But we can't continue to have a bloated civil service the way that it is and the inefficiencies that have set in there. Part of the reason why we've put our End Cadre Deployment bill to Parliament is to begin that rightsizing process – prevent and cut off political appointments into the civil service and start to bring the amount of money we're spending on the government itself down. So we've got more money to spend on people and services and infrastructure.
On hope for the future of our nation
I share Prof Jansen's hope for the future. I wouldn't be doing what I was doing if I didn't fundamentally believe that tomorrow can be better than today. And I do believe that there's nothing wrong with South Africa that cannot be fixed. There are good people in the South African police service. There are excellent people in our hospitals. There are centres of excellence all over the government. They get drowned out, crowded out and pushed out by the cadres deployed who are then threatened by the fact that they're doing the job, they're working the hours that are required. They're not stealing. I think we owe it to them to be at the forefront, the vanguard of cleaning up and cleaning out the state so that we can do right by them and allow a space for people who want to serve in the public service to do so with dignity and in a way in which their integrity is not compromised every day by rotters that are operating the departments next to them. The longer you keep those rotten people in an organisation, the more they spread like a cancer and the more people get away with the nonsense that they do, the more people around them say, 'Well, I might as well join the frenzy because there's no consequences'. We've got to clean up and clean out the rot as quickly as possible, and you've got to weed out bad individuals and then you've got to make sure that they are blacklisted so that they're never able to be put on a public payroll again if dismissed for corruption, maladministration, fraud or theft.
Alec Hogg's interview notes
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