Gareth Cliff and Phumi Mashigo
South Africa Election Results
Gareth Cliff and Phumi Mashigo - South Africa Election Results
- Good evening everybody, and welcome to our final episode dealing with the lovely country of South Africa and all of our vicissitudes. Tonight, we have results for you. We have all kinds of useful and interesting numbers. Phumi Mashigo who’s my co-host this evening. Phumi, you are a big, big election nerd. So for you, this was like the world cup of soccer crossed with the Olympics, crossed with the tennis. Everything altogether. It’s your favourite thing to do. And I think what this election has revealed, and we’ll get into some analysis just now, we’ve had some very good people on before. Some of their predictions have been spot on. Some of their predictions is a little bit off. But then… You know, no one is asking-
Just one. Just one has been off really.
And I think what the election shows and probably one of the reasons, though you can speak for yourself, that you find these things interesting is because it gives you insight into the soul and the mind of a country. At least that portion of the country that votes. The rest remain an enigma. But how are you feeling about what you’ve seen? And let’s explain to everybody what has happened so that we can bring everyone on board on lockdown university tonight.
I think we must start with the fact that we are sitting here having this conversation. It’s a freezing cold day in Joburg. I just want you all to know. But you know what’s not happening? That there’s no burning of tyres, there’s no looting of buildings. Our country’s business is going on. And this is one of the things that I think even in 1994… So one of the parties… Well, two of the parties had a slogan going into this election that 2024 is our 1994 because of all of the young people that were coming to vote for the first time. And just like in 1994, there was quite a lot of like trepidation. I think leading up to the election, a lot of people were feeling a lot of uncertainty, lots of fear, lots of fear and loathing as it were. And for many, many people, I think there was so much uncertainty. And one thing has come true, but it hasn’t been accompanied. Just like in 1994, it hasn’t been accompanied with anything untoward. And that is the ANC… Big news of the day, the ANC basically losing power.
So I want to first… And you’ve got a little presentation and maybe we should start with that just to give people an overview, but I couldn’t agree more. You know, I am so sick and tired of hearing morons of doom all over the world. And I know this is happening in America. There are many people listening to and watching us from the United States tonight. I love America. I think it’s a wonderful country. I love the people of America. I’ve been there a handful of times. I have never found myself in any way opposed to anything that’s going on there in terms of the establishment of the country, what its… You know, the American dream, all of that stuff. I’m a big fan of the American Constitution, the Declaration of Human Rights, the Declaration of Independence. I find all of those things to be tremendously inspiring. But my God, if I have to hear one more Democrat or Republican in the media saying that this is the last election America will ever have and that they’re on the brink of civil war or insurgencies or revolutions, I just-
See a tip of that effect.
I can’t handle this nonsense anymore. And in this country, in South Africa, we have our fair share of morons as well. And it seems that they get a huge kick out of telling people that everything’s going to fall apart. And I like that Phumi started with that. Everything is fine. In fact, you could argue, and this will be my argument over the next few weeks, that whatever takes place, whatever coalitions are formed, there are better and worse choices in my opinion. But everything will be okay. I mean, even if the worst parties come together, they will have less of a share of the vote than the ANC did in 1999. And that means that there’s still a modicum of trade-offs that have to take place and there are no perfect solutions. There are only trade-offs. And now that South Africa has gone to the polls, that we’ve shown that we’re the diverse country where we like to have this very complicated mix of people, personalities, ideologies, policies. This is exactly what South Africa is. It’s a mirror that we’ve got to hold up to the country. But, and I do reserve this but, 16 million out of the 27 million registered voters actually went and cast their ballots. And of those 16 million, 217,000 of them made a mistake because we don’t have conscientious objectives in this country.
Or maybe we do.
No, I don’t… Not 200,000 of them. We have… These people registered. They went to the poll, sometimes stood in very long lines, went into the booth, and then decided to spoil their ballot. No, I would say that these are very, very stupid people. I would say that we have at least-
I know at least three. I know at least three people who spoiled their ballot for the national.
I would say we have at least 200,000 very, very stupid people who should not be allowed to vote the next time around. That’s all. And if there are conscientious objectives and people who spoil their ballots on purpose in that crew, you guys have a hell of a way of showing it. So, let’s get into the charts, Phum. Let’s look at these numbers. Okay, so this is the final national result with 100% of the vote counted. 23,000 voting districts completed. And as I said, 200,000 odd spoiled votes. But the other proportion of it, everything seems to have gone swimmingly. Total voter turnout, 58.64% of registered voters which means that the vast majority of this country did not participate in our democracy. So for those who are big fans of democracy and believe it’s some hallowed and sacred thing as the press is constantly trying to tell us it is, you’re in the minority. I’m sorry to do this to you, but you’re probably not among the great swaths of South African civilization who don’t believe that the election is the most important thing. Phumi and I happily are. We went and voted last week. And these are the results. You can see that map on the right of your screen. The green areas are areas that are very strong, A and C areas. The yellow ones, DA areas. There are little patches of pink all over KwaZulu-Natal. That is for KZN we see which we told you about last week. And then there are little bits that you could see which are Patriotic Alliance, Freedom Front Plus, couple of IFPs, but that’s the overall picture. The ANC getting just over 40%. There were a couple of polls that showed that they might come up under 40% which would have been… I mean, just the mental barrier of 40% I think is bad enough ‘cause they were among the meat saying. I don’t know that it’s… Phumi, you also said- You’re not so sure that-
I did not said that. To get to 40%. Just to give you… Gareth, maybe let’s move to the next slide because that’ll give you an understanding of how much they have lost. These are the big four. The ANC, African National Commerce, is the first one. The yellow is 2019, our last national election. And the blue is 2024. They lost almost 20%. 17% loss is what they took in this. 17% is a stretch, Gareth. To go from 57%, which is where they were in 2019 to 40%, it’s a devastating blow. And as you can see, we did all of these parties. The Democratic Alliance being the second party and they still are the official opposition being the second biggest party, but they lost votes too. This one I called. Even though they’ve gone up by 1%, I told you, I think they’re going to be a big loser in this election. I mean, they’ve lost almost 300,000 votes, is what they lost in this election.
But crucially, percentage wise, they’re up on 2019 and-
By 1%.
Yeah, but still… I mean, they’ve kind of maintained. You know, I think that the… If you’re the EFF and you were only at 10%, then those 300,000 votes really make a difference and you could see it there. But if you’re the DA or the ANC, as you go up slightly less. So the big problem for the ANC obviously is that they drop below the 50 and by a very wide margin. So they have to be quite careful about who they make friends with now in order to make up all of that.
Yeah. Look, it’s going to be a thing. But here’s another one that was a bit of a hit. The EFF, which was the third biggest party, is now the fourth biggest party. They were the third biggest party with one 1.8 million votes. They’ve also lost 300,000 votes to 1.5. And they’ve since been overtaken. We spoke about this party last week by Jacob Zuma. Former ANC National President and former president of South Africa started his own party in December 2023 and he is now the third biggest party in South Africa. The IFP, and you was right, they’ve gone up.
You did call the EFF going down and you did say that they had plateaued and they’d reached their ceiling in the previous election and your words were prophetic. They also been very quiet. I mean, I think MK has stolen a lot of their thunder. The online noise hasn’t come as it always did before from the EFF. It came much more from MK supporters. And I think they’ve been humbled quite a lot. You know, the ANC certainly been humbled. I mean, Fikile Mbalula has, for the first time in my memory of him, been thoughtful, considered, careful. His choice of language has been conciliatory. I mean, I didn’t ever think I’d use the word humble and the name for Fikile Mbalula in a sentence. But it does appear that we have to get credit where it’s due.
Well, what they have lost, the ANC, we have in our national assembly, we have 400 seats. In 2019, the ANC had 230 of those 400 seats. And this year they go back to the National Assembly with only 152 seats. So, almost 70 seats. 70 MPs are going to have to be cowed.
Can’t say I’m sorry.
So maybe Fikile Mbalula is trying to ensure that he keeps his seat.
Perhaps, perhaps. I mean, he is the Secretary General. He never had a seat while he was Secretary General. But I do think that there are lots of people who are suddenly… You’re going to see a lot of floor crossing in KwaZulu-Natal, right? I mean, you’re going to see plenty of people who were ANC stalwarts begging at the doors of the MK party now at that provincial level.
I think if we can just move on to the next slide which is going to show everybody what the new National Assembly is going to look like. So what you’ve got in the second where it says the votes, that’s the absolute number of people who arrived in a ballot and put their cross next to these particular parties and the support in percentages. But the important number to look at is the number of seats that they’re going to have going into this. Is this the right one? Sorry, I’m just…
Those are the seats for just the… Because we had three ballot papers, remember?
Yes.
So there was a breakdown. Half of the National Assembly seats are national votes. So that’s everybody across the country voting for the party of their choice to run the government. Then there was a second ballot paper which gives proportional to the population of each province a certain number of seats in the National Assembly. So, this is half of them. So you kind of… You can almost sort of double the number for each of these to get the absolute number of seats out of 400. So this is kind of a look at if it was 200 seats in the absolute.
So that’s the thing. That’s what we’re sitting with. But what we do have, and you know, Gareth, I’m a fan of this, we are now going to have 18 parties represented in our National Assembly which has gone up from the 14 that we had before. Because the new guys that we also spoke about have also garnered some interest, you know? So BOSA which was a DA breakaway essentially with Mmusi Maimane who was the leader of the DA, he got two seats. RISE got two seats. Patriotic Alliance. We spoke about Patriotic Alliance and Gayton McKenzie, I think he ended up with nine seats, the regional as well as the national. And ActionSA, Herman Mashaba. So those new parties that we also spoke about which we were watching quite closely have made it. They’ve made it onto the ballot. They’ve made it into the National Assembly. So, some new blood. And then what we are still to see is what the MK looks like. Because even as we now have the IEC, we spoke about this, which is our independent electoral commission, have come out. They’ve declared the elections. They’re just doing mopping up now. So there are some issues that have come up that they have to go back and do some recounts. But Julius Malema, whom we all thought might be a problem child, came out very emphatically, happy with the results. We may have had some… He said, “We may have had some of our observers complain about some issues but it’s not material, and we accept the results.” The ANC came out to say they accept the results. President Cyril Ramaphosa was handed over with the list of the parties and their allocations on Sunday. He accepts the results. Again, something that has been talked about almost worldwide. Will the ANC be willing to accept a result if they lose? And they have lost in a very big way. The only person that is problematic is, surprise, surprise, our tumultuous former President Gedleyihlekisa Jacob Zuma. He has even threatened that they’re not showing up. So they eventually have, I think, 52 seats going into this National Assembly because they are now the third biggest party. And he is threatening that they will not show up if they do not get… Initially they said a recount because they think they should have had more votes and they believe that the elections were rigged. But earlier today, I saw him speaking outside… No, yesterday speaking outside of the electoral court saying actually they want a revote. So…
Well, I don’t think-
We have 14 days.
I don’t think this is surprising to anyone. And we can talk a little bit about Jacob Zuma in a short while because he’s definitely still a fixture on our political scene. Just one other interesting thing that came out of this. If you look at the breakdown of votes across urban and rural areas in South Africa, quite interestingly, the DA at 33.8% is now the biggest urban party in the country in cities.
Absolutely.
ANC at 32.5. The EFF at 11.1. MK at 7.8. And interestingly enough, others, that would be all those other smaller parties you spoke about, 14.8. So in order, the DA is now the biggest party in cities in South Africa, then the ANC and then other which is I think a fairly interesting development. It’s something which has been happening over the last few elections anyway.
I think if we go to the next slide, it’ll also be interesting because the ANC has lost power in all the power bases of our country. So Gauteng which is our economic hub, this is where the Johannesburg Stock Exchange is, this is where the biggest… It really is. This is where the biggest companies are in South Africa. In Gauteng, they didn’t even manage to get to 40%. They only got 34% of the vote. Significant loss. And the DA has grown substantially. Urban areas, predominantly this is where all the big metros are, and they’ve completely lost. And if you look at the mix, it was interesting also to see the MK. We knew the MK would perform well in KwaZulu-Natal, which is predominantly isiZulu speaking, which is where Jacob Zuma’s power base has always been. But for them to come in, even in Gauteng, and get 9% of the vote was quite something spectacular to watch. But absolutely lost power here. And I think the next slide is the Western Cape which is where Cape Town is, and the DA-
There’s a lot of consternation down there. And let’s just say that the PA which is the Patriotic Alliance of Gayton McKenzie, the Freedom Front Plus, MK, the EFF, they all are saying that the Western Cape vote was not done properly and that the DA had infiltrated the independent electoral commission and they’re all very unhappy. There were also lots of pundits who were predicting that the DA would lose the Western Cape. I think a lot of people in the DA were quite concerned about that, but it turns out that they are pretty safe with their 55.3. It’s certainly down a little bit, but it’s not down so substantially that they have to worry about coalitions and the Western Cape will continue to be run by the DA.
And again, I just want to pull up this number. I’m not going to share it on my screen. But just looking at the absolute numbers, and this is where we all know how preposterous the idea of vote rigging has been because if there are votes being rigged, who would be rigging the votes? Essentially across the country, it would be the ANC. So they have rigged their way to a 17 percentage point loss. In the Western Cape, it would be the DA because that’s what everybody is raising is that the DA couldn’t have had this kind of support. But if you look at absolute numbers in the Western Cape, even though the DA has maintained and grown a little bit, in terms of absolute numbers of people who came out to vote for them, they are down. So they’ve rigged themselves into like less numbers.
You know, some rig if that’s what’s happened.
Well, yeah. But look, we do have this independent electoral commission and they are going to… They really are. They’re not going to not listen to all of these various people. They are going to be, and they have come out with some of them already where they’ve come out to say, “We’ve looked at what was raised. This is what we got there. We did have a recount.” I know in Limpopo there was an issue as well. And they’ve been very much coming out to say, “This is what we’ve looked at. This is what was raised. This is what we’ve looked at. This is how we’ve investigated and this has been the result.” And we do have a special electoral court which is where Jacob Zuma was yesterday because the MK party… When Wayne was on with us talking about coming into this election, he spoke about whether the MK party can hold it together to get to the election. One of the things that they are fighting about is, who is the leader of the MK party? Is it Jacob Zuma or is it the man who registered the party? A Jabulani Khumalo whom I had never heard about, new player in the landscape of politics in South Africa, but seems to be a very big power struggle between those two and looking at the electoral court or whether the documents were forged and Jacob Zuma has stolen this party from him. So this is…
So let’s look at KwaZulu-Natal since Jacob Zuma is not… We’re not finished talking about him, but look at MK. I mean, this… If anything in this election would’ve been a surprise. You know, if you’re an alien who landed on planet Earth after the 2024 results and you saw this, as compared with landing after the 2019 results, you’d go, “Who the hell is MK?” Because they came in like a wrecking ball in KZN, to use Miley Cyrus’ term. And I think this number, when I saw the final figures here, I think that whether or not you take them seriously, whether you think that it’s just a party of people built on grievances, which is not an incorrect statement to make, you have to hand it to them. This is very impressive. Not just this number in KZN but the number of 14% in the National Assembly too. I mean, that is great shakes by anyone’s estimation.
This number is astounding. Astounding. Because even though we saw some of it in kind of local polling, even though we saw some of it by elections that we had leading up to this election, nobody, I don’t know a single person in any of the analysts that we speak to almost on a daily basis, any of the polls who said 45%. 45% is what? And they were also able to bring numbers out. Remember, we spoke about what voter turnout…
Yeah.
Would also do.
That voter turnout would also distort this number.
Before you take the slide down, and probably even more humiliating to the ANC is that they’ve dropped a third in a party which they thought they were on the ascendant in. So, third-
Absolutely.
At only 16.99%, that has to be their overall worst result countrywide.
This is definitely their worst result countrywide. They got a absolute rubbing by the MK party. But interestingly, if you look at the numbers of the EFF, MK, and the ANC combined, they are roughly the… They are actually just less than the numbers that Thabo Mbeki got in his second term for the ANC.
So in other words, MK voters are angry ANC voters.
Disillusioned ANC voters. And for whatever reason, right? I have had… In the past couple of days, I’ve had on my… On my social media, I had a little bit of backlash because my view is that what we see in KZN is we see possibly the most politically mature part of our country. And why I say that is because the electorates in KZN are very quick to change the administration if they don’t like it. First, when we first voted, the IFP, the Inkatha Freedom Party, was the governing party in KZN. They were the dominant party. This is the party of Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. And they were the dominant party. And they were there in the first election. They were there in the second election. In the third election, the voters of KwaZulu-Natal changed their minds and they voted in the ANC to be the party that governs KZN. And again, we see them now saying for the third time, the only other party that’s changed its allegiance, the only other part of our country that’s changed its allegiance is the Western Cape. It changed from the ANC to the DA and hasn’t changed since. So these guys here, we may not like their choice, but they’re certainly able to exercise their democratic rights and say, “We are not happy with this administration. Throw them out.”
I think also KwaZulu-Natal has had the absolute worst of it. I mean, they had those riots two years ago. They’ve had floods. They’ve just had the most atrocious weather over the last weekend. Just atrocious, atrocious weather. And the province is ailing. I mean, Durban looks like a train wreck.
And it was hit by a tornado yesterday.
Yeah. And it’s just that place is suffering horrendously. And I think the people there, they’ve had enough. So this is also a bit of a vote of frustration and of rebellion, and I’m not surprised by it at all. But I think we can now start talking about the next one. Bring that up.
The Western Cape.
No, we’ve had the Western Cape. Okay, sorry.
We did the Western Cape already. But I want to bring… There’s a comment here from Zoom user that says South Africans are not fools. They know when they are being conned. It suits them. They may accept it, they may not, they have been conned by experts. South Africa may be in trouble now but they will rise above it all. And I think that this raises it’s a good place to segue to the next thing because one of the conversations that have been taking place in South Africa, which is very different to what happens in America, is who has paid for what? Who is paying for the campaigns and who stands to benefit? And we’ve had this conversation. And this is the thing also about the populace in South Africa is even at the lowest level, at the lowest common denominator, these conversations are always playing out. Nobody knows who the funders of the Jacob Zuma MK or Jabulani MK are. Nobody knows. So what we don’t know today is we don’t know who stands to benefit the most from the chaos that Jacob Zuma is churning because that is what he’s doing. Ever since he came out, even though he’s the biggest winner in this election, he has been churning chaos. He has no reason to say he doesn’t accept these results, but he’s saying he doesn’t accept the results. It’s to create chaos. It’s to sow chaos. Some of the parties, a big conversation that has been happening in South Africa really is also about the big money that plays in the space of politics. And therefore, who the puppet masters are, who has paid for the ANC campaign and who stands to benefit. Or now, how much they have lost. The funders… And we have an electoral act that tells us that the parties have to declare their funding. The EFF have very cleverly not declared their funding. Over the past three cycles, they’ve not told us. And we’ve seen them spending the money. We’ve seen the posters. We’ve seen the events. We’ve seen the cars and the ads and all of that. But we don’t know who paid them for their campaign. A big conversation around the Oppenheimers because the men in the Oppenheimer family…
Go on.
You go.
No, no, no. Because there’s the women and there’s the men in the Oppenheimer family. Go on.
So the men in the Oppenheimer family have backed the ones we know. They backed the DA. Some of them backed ActionSA. And the ladies, Mary Slack and her daughters, have backed RISE, have backed BOSA. And a relatively unknown player who’s been a very big funder, Martin Moshal out of Durban, out of KZN, has backed ActionSA, DA, and Rise Mzansi.
Just proving again that you women should stay out of politics.
No. Actually, if we spent more money in politics I think. But this has also started a conversation in South Africa.
If you spent it in the right places because undeniably, I mean, you saw Rise Mzansi stuff all over Johannesburg. It was a big play for them. And I’m not saying that this is some kind of coordinated conspiracy theory. But really for the amount of money spent on Rise Mzansi, it’s a deep disappointment. And I think it’s also a bit of a rejection of kind of a slightly left of centre approach to opposition politics, a white left of centre rejection. The other thing that was kind of rejected, and I think you’ll agree with me on this one, Phumi, because there were people wearing a lot of kaffirs and talking about Palestine prior to this election, it resulted in no advantage for those parties that made a big noise about Palestine. I think the average South African, and we knew this already and I’ve been saying it to Jewish friends of mine, I’ve been saying it to Palestinian supporters, I’ve been telling them the whole time, the average South African does not care about what’s going on in the Middle East. And I mean that they are apathetic. They have survival things that they have to deal with on a daily basis and what goes on in the Middle East is completely immaterial to them. And those who are informed about the Middle East, and depending on where that information comes from and I know you just got back from Israel now. Clearly, taking up the cause of Palestine which the ANC thought would be a very sexy thing to do has not had any advantage for them at the polls.
Gareth, I have been cackling like a mad thing when it comes to this because even as you said at the beginning of the show today, I am very, very interested in the dynamic of how human beings make their decisions. And I was very interested to know, and I know both you and Wayne thought I was making a very tenuous case for Al Jama-ah. Al Jama-ah is a muslim party and it is predominant in the Western Cape, and they are the only ones. But they have been incredibly vocal. They have been driving with the Palestinian agenda, particularly in the Western Cape, contrasting it with the DA in fact to a point where the DA has been called a Zionist party. And watching all of that, flags in various places. We’ve got a big flag in one… Just as you drive on the… One here in Joburg, but it has not translated into votes. And again, with the issue of, South Africans know what they want and South Africans are very smart and astute. They would rather not show up to vote if they feel that the people that are on the ballot are not going to make a difference to their lives and it’s not going to change a thing. But the Palestine issue and Israel issue has been a deep disappointment, I think, for many, many, many people. The ANC in particular, they are showing in the Western Cape, they took a beating. Al Jama-ah, they’ve not moved. They have not moved. The EFF, also very vocal, very pro-Palestinian, did not make a dent for them either. And the ones who were very vocal for Israel, ActionSA, ACDP, Patriotic Alliance, all of those people saw a really positive outlook. Lauren was asking, which part did the Muslim population vote for? Judging by the numbers, Lauren, they voted for the DA ‘cause the DA remains-
Yeah, so they put… This is interesting. So if we look at what was rejected either in part or in whole, I think that the idea of South Africa as a pro-Palestinian ally is rejected. That’s a very ANC/EFF thing. It didn’t even feature in MK’s stance really. The other thing is I think-
Ooh, because what does the MK stand for, Gareth?
Well, I mean, Jacob Zuma. That’s what it stands for. You can argue that there’s more to it, but I don’t think so. A rejection of leftist, kind of what the Democrats in America are doing in the form of RISE and BOSA and that kind of thing. South Africa’s much more conservative than people think. And so all of those parties were kind of ignored. There was a little bit of… You know, Gayton Mackenzie made a huge noise about foreigners. So did Herman Mashaba. The rest of the country, you can say, is xenophobic. Because if that was your chief issue, open borders, closed borders, you would’ve voted for Gayton or for ActionSA. And while Gayton has done well, I don’t think that in any way you can say 9% is a massive rejection of South Africa’s international immigration policies or of the many people from other countries that live in this country.
Absolutely not. And I think… You know, the thing with the last few minutes that we have is to talk a little bit about forecasting again. Right now, it’s anybody’s game because there was lots and lots of talk about coalitions coming into this election so much so that John Steenhuisen and the DA actually brought together, had a big conference, brought together a whole lot of parties. I think eventually there were 11 parties. But of the 11 parties that did sign up to what they were calling a Moonshot Pact, that they then later rebranded to MPC. What was it? Multi-party coalition. Which ended up with only, I think, 7 of the 11 actually represented on the ballot. But those parties which would have been the DA, the IFP, I don’t think Patriotic Alliance was in that, but Freedom Front Plus, all the parties in the Moonshot Pact ended up with 29%, collectively 29% of the vote. And now-
But at least we can say that they’re forward thinking because the idea of coalition politics didn’t even occur to the ANC. There were so much hubris going on there that they didn’t think that that would be a reality. And you and I interviewed a guy from the ANC just a couple of weeks ago and they were completely… “We’ll easily get 50,” he said. And you know, the EFF have hardly been making overtures to the ANC. In fact, what they’ve been doing is what all the other parties have been doing, rubbishing them at every possible opportunity. And now people have to be bedfellows. And it’s going to be fascinating to see what happens. There are a couple of alternatives.
So what does it look like? What are the possibilities for coalitions? When we had John Steenhuisen on our show, Gareth and I asked him about the Moonshot Pact versus… He had been quoted in the media just prior to coming on the show as being open to a coalition with the ANC. And I asked him about this and he said, “No, no, no.” The way that it was quoted was it was taken a little bit out of context because for them they are helping on keeping an ANC what they call a doomsday coalition, an ANC/EFF coalition out of government.“ But two days ago, they have abandoned the Moonshot Pact and have opened up… They’ve constituted a little group of big players and old players. Tony Leon who was once the leader of the DA, Helen Zille who is the leader of the FedEx in the DA, along with their current Chief Whip in parliament and two others. They are four base going into coalition talks and they are willing to talk to anyone. They have now pivoted and they see an MK/EFF coalition as a doomsday coalition. So…
Well, you see, the ANC plus EFF is not enough to get them over the line. So they’ll need then to have another party, either a small one like Patriotic Alliance, and we know Gayton will do anything. He’ll ally with anyone.
For power.
Yeah, he said as much. And he know he doesn’t make any bones about it. He’s like, "Whatever I need to do to get power.” The obvious sensible way here, and if it makes me sound like I’m biassed, well then I am, is for the two biggest parties to get each other to 60 something percent. You only have one party to negotiate with then. You only have one discussion to have. The markets are already showing that they are optimistic about that, although that’s also started a whole conversation in South Africa about how much we should take the markets into consideration. But if you look at South Africa and the voting population and the mandate that’s been given, it’s a very split mandate. You know, you’ve got people. About 40% of the population says the ANC should be in charge and then everybody else is much, much smaller. So if you take the two biggest ones, you’re likely to pacify and please the most people. But there is obviously the option of-
Or upset the most people because the two biggest ones, the ANC and the DA are essentially ideologically opposed to each other.
Yeah, but I mean-
So if the ANC goes into bed with the DA or if the DA goes into bed with the ANC, will it not alienate their already disgruntled base? And what does that do for the rest of South Africans and how they feel about how their vote is taken into consideration? If you have voted in one way and then you end up with the people you didn’t want in government, you know?
Well, I’m afraid that there are a lot of South Africans that aren’t going to get what they want. And really, that wouldn’t be different to the elections in any country. But what’s going to happen here is that, as I said at the beginning of this discussion, there are no perfect solutions. There are only trade-offs and the pragmatic decision at this stage for the president of the country because he’s the guy who has the most say, and they’ve said they’re not getting rid of him. Fikile Mbalula said there’s no way we’re kicking Cyril Ramaphosa out.
Which is what EFF and MK want. Remember that President Jacob Zuma has a bone to grind with Cyril Ramaphosa because he feels that he was thrown out before his term ended. Hey, the English this afternoon. It’s not my first language, guys. His term ended prematurely to make way for Cyril Ramaphosa and he’s been in and out of court. He feels he’s been hounded by Cyril Ramaphosa and you hear it in his posture and you hear it in the words that they speak. The MK people, whenever they talk about the ANC, they talk about the ANC of Cyril Ramaphosa. So they want Cyril Ramaphosa gone. The EFF also wants Cyril Ramaphosa gone. And so already on the table, the ANC is coming into any negotiation saying if you want our president gone, we have nothing to talk to you about.
Right, so that’s become instead of what the Moonshot Pact thought it would be at the start of their talks to each other about who we will and won’t be friends with. That’s all been thrown into the rubbish bin. The non-negotiable for the ANC at this point looks to be, and there may be many people in the ANC who are not comfortable with this, but as I said earlier, there are no perfect solutions, is that Cyril’s not going to be dumped. Now I think probably from the point of view of stability and buy-in going forward, there are so many options available. The ANC are going to have to be the ones who decide. If they decide to get into bed with the DA, it may cost them at the next election. But I think their trajectory has been down anyway. The EFF are not in an upward trajectory. They’re in no position to be bargaining. In the next election, they’ll do even worse. The MK party has got quite a lot of fuel.
Leverage.
In the tank and therefore some leverage. But with them contesting the election, I think they may be spilling some moral capital before the game’s even on. You know, I’ve always said Jacob Zuma is a massively… He’s a very smart political operator. He’s no fool, but he is 82 years old. And a lot of what this is about is his survival and not having to go to prison which again has a parallel in the United States with what’s going on with Donald Trump. So you can draw those parallels if you like. I think MK, if they’re not careful, will find themselves excluded. And this could happen if the ANC and the DA-
Oh, yes.
If they decide to get together, right? If the ANC and DA go, “All right, guys, for the next year we won’t criticise each other publicly. We will put together a kind of government of national unity.” And remember there will be detrimental effects for the ANC and for the DA from this. Because there are a lot of people who like the DA who hate the ANC, and vice versa. “But we’ll make this work and we will cooperate with each other on a pragmatic basis, less ideology.” All of that stuff, we don’t need. If the two of them get together, they don’t need to talk to any of the other parties. Those other parties can kick and scream and make a noise in parliament, but effectively they can be sidelined which is obviously not-
So what has been deeply disappointing for me over the past couple of days is watching this talk of coalitions in this way. Firstly, because this is not a new place. We are not at an impasse here in South Africa. This is not the first time that we have a group of people in our National Assembly that have been on diametric opposites to each other. When we started this journey of democracy here in South Africa with arguably the most charismatic man ever in the history of humanity, Nelson Mandela as the president of our country, we had a government of national unity.
[Gareth] Right.
And that government was made up of the National party, was made up of the ANC, was made up of the PAC, of AZAPO, of all of these parties and all of these people who had literally been at each other’s throats two years before. The difference then was that we had a vision for our country and we had a leader who was able to reach across the aisle and bring people to his side. So obviously I’ve now gone down another rabbit hole as if I needed one more reason to stay awake in the middle of the night of how our National Assembly actually works. What do we need for the National Assembly to form a quorum so that they can pass laws because that’s the job of the National Assembly so that they can oversee. So, the business of parliament. And those numbers, I’ve come to realise, don’t really need Jacob Zuma to show up with these 50 people actually.
They can operate pretty well without him.
In fact, they could even elect a president because the rules of our parliament, and now it has been gazetted by the Chief Justice, 14 days. We have 14 days-
By the way, it should be said that that is one of the threats that the MK party have made. They have said that they might not go to Parliament at all. And some people have said, “Well, okay. Good.”
I’m one of those people. He doesn’t know how to win. He really doesn’t know how to win. He has won and he has all the cards, but he’s now tripping himself up over something so minuscule that all it does is it sows chaos. But really what needs to happen now is within 14 days of having held the election, the National Assembly needs to come together. And that has now been gazetted by the Chief Justice and they have to elect a president, a speaker of the NCOP as well as the full legislator, and the president then is the one who constitutes his cabinet once he is sworn into office. And they don’t need 200 people to vote for the president. They don’t need 200 people which the ANC has the highest number of people. I think they only need a third to be able to vote laws into power. To change the constitution, you need two thirds of the house.
And if you want to change the Bill of Rights, at the front of the Constitution, you need 75%. So those things are pretty much-
So, the business of parliament. The business of parliament can continue with a strong leader. Which brings me to Cyril Ramaphosa on Sunday at the pronouncement of the results. Where the hell was that man these past five years?
Yeah.
He was confident. He was jovial. For a person who had lost as much as he lost, he came onto that podium and owned the space.
Statesman like we haven’t seen this since he took over. And I’m so glad you saw the same thing because you and I have been very valuable and vocal about our criticism of the man. We’ve pretty much written him off as a loser. And honestly, there’s still a big part of me-
He’s a loser.
Yeah, well, he is. And in this election, he certainly. But if he can be that guy he was on Saturday, on Sunday rather, where he stood up. He first of all made a joke about the ANC not doing so well and he wished it was 2019 'cause the chairperson of the IEC had made a mistake when reading the results. And he joked and he was very good, had the whole room eating out of his hand. And then he said, “Well, with my other hat on, as president of the Republic, well done on a free and fair election. These are the results and now we must go to the business of looking after this country and getting things moving.” Very, very powerful. The kind of thing that we’ve been looking for from him. Who knew that he had to be put in his place by the voters before he would start taking his job seriously? And perhaps it’s just a show. Perhaps he was good for that moment. I wouldn’t necessarily start thinking that he’s suddenly the world’s greatest leader, but we will see. Maybe this is… Maybe he’s relieved, Phumi. Maybe he’s relieved because he’s been dealing with so much shit in the ANC. You know, he’s been putting up with factional… Now the factions are outside the ANC. Now the faction largely… I mean, there’s still some who are going to have qualms. But factions are now outside of the ANC and he can now get to the business of trying to tidy it up and help it to survive because I don’t think the outlook is particularly good if they manage to put together a decent government now. And if they manage to start getting things done in terms of service delivery, in terms of making sure that poor people are looked after, houses are built, the stuff that Thabo Mbeki wanted to do. And I’m glad Thabo Mbeki has come back into the fold because the man has an enormous amount of gravitas. We discussed him in one of the early episodes of this. Cyril and he have buried the hatchet 'cause he said he’d come in and help the ANC campaign. So as far as we know, it looks like they might be able to kick some plans that he originally came up with back into play.
Look, I think now what we watch eagerly is whether they can hold it together and pull it together and over the line. We need the business of this country to work. I hope that conversation about the people of South Africa and what they have voted for in the way that they have voted is they have voted to be put first. They have voted for… And they’re saying… I think more than anything, the people of South Africa are saying to the politicians, “Get your act together and get over yourselves and work towards making our country awesome because our country can be awesome.” I think that in the next couple of weeks, we are going to see a lot of haggling and maybe some of that haggling will end up with some good for us. I think the markets will get over themselves. They are jitters. They’ll get over those jitters. But I do also hope that the people don’t get left behind. I do hope that we get a government on the other side and somebody in the comments, I can’t find it now, had talked about whether we are finally going to see people being held accountable for all the corruption because that is the big job that needs to happen next is really the disentanglement and pulling apart of all of these networks of corruption. And I’m not sure if we’re going to get that.
I’m going to make a prediction that in the next five years we may have up to three presidents. They won’t… None of them will have very long tenures. And that’s okay. I would like to come out of this not only to see accountability start to creep back into government and people going to jail for stealing and people watching each other so the stealing doesn’t happen in the first place because that’s been a major hallmark of ANC government. But what I’d also like to see is I’d like to see the powers of the executive reduced back to what they were under Nelson Mandela. You have a head of state and I still maintain that the best possible outcome here would be to… You know, if Cyril somehow isn’t the guy, then put in the IFP because the head of stake really should be a figurehead, should be someone who people can… They don’t know a lot about him. He just kind of cuts ribbons, opens doors, and you don’t this over powerful executive which we’ve had in this country. And I know that’s a problem in America too. You need your legislature which is your elected body to be the one that makes the most important decisions. And your courts need to be empowered again. And the executive is just there to do the business. And I would like to see the powers of the presidency reduced under the next five year term of whatever kind of coalition government we have. And I’d like to see cabinet reduced to 16 portfolios instead of 412 or whatever we’ve got. I would like to see a generosity of spirit come out of whatever government we have after this.
Even if you don’t have the EFF and the PA and the Freedom Front and the IFP in that government, I would like them to because you don’t have to appoint from parliament, although all of these people will be in parliament. I would like them to appoint someone like Mmusi Maimane as education minister. He’s been talking about education for ages and he cares about it deeply. And he’s a smart guy and I don’t believe it’s possible to do a worse job than Angie Motshekga has done. Throw higher education and basic education into one and make Mmusi the minister there. Even though he didn’t get a mandate that sufficiently deserves a ministry, give it to him. Then he feels he’s got skin in the game. Take Gayton Mackenzie and put him in charge of the police. I know people go, “Oh, but he’s a gangster.” Listen, if you want to sort out the gangsters we have in this country, you need a gangster. And Gayton Mackenzie will make the police proud of being police again. He’s the kind of guy you need. He’s a little bit wild, little bit out of control, but he’s the kind of guy who could take control of all of that stuff. And I know it’s wacky of me to suggest this. Some people might think I’m insane. I’d like him to be minister of police. I’d like Glynnis Breytenbach to be Minister of Justice. I’d like the EFF to be given one or two of the following portfolios. I’d like Steenhuisen, Floyd Chibambo or Julius Malema to be in charge of either housing or social development or both. They keep talking about how they represent poor people. They care about the poor. They’re interested in improving people’s lives. Give them something to do instead of have them outside the tent pissing in. I really think there’s an opportunity here for people to make an incredibly generous government where you include parties that you don’t agree with, but you give them a job to do. So, your ideology comes second to what you actually have to practically achieve because that is the South Africa that we need going forward. We need a South Africa that’s pragmatic. We need a South Africa with people who have tremendous skills to get things done and not skills to make great rhetoric.
Noise.
And noise. We’ve had enough of that for the last 15, maybe 12 years. Now it’s time to get things done. And I want us to implement Thabo Mbeki’s idea of a national dialogue. The man is smart. I’ve had lots of things that I didn’t agree with Thabo Mbeki about over time, but I think he’s a wise elder and that those are hard to come by in South Africa at the moment.
That idea of a national dialogue… That idea of a national dialogue was Dr. Paliluler. We had him first and he said… From what he’s seen with the numbers, goodness, we need to decide, who are we as South Africans and what do we want of this country? And let’s work towards that.
So in the absence of an ideology from a party that informs policy which we’re going to have because they’re going to sit and argue about this stuff if they don’t have a better option. In the absence of that, let the national dialogue that Thabo Mbeki will chair inform the policy. In other words, let that be the think tank of government. Let everybody be a part of it. That’s what Thabo Mbeki said. Young, old, rich, poor, black, white, coloured, Indian, let everybody who has an opinion be part of the national dialogue and let that then funnel the best stuff into government for policy to be made. I cannot imagine a better place in the world to live if all these things on my wishlist come true.
And I just want one person to have the gumption, to be the one who can hold it all together and pull it all in a particular direction. And you have never heard me say this, Gareth, but that Cyril Ramaphosa that I saw on Sunday maybe could do it if he can find it in himself to do that every day, all day, and work with all of the people that he has in front of him now. I would love to see that. I really would.
I said a mean thing about women not needing to vote and that you women have ruined politics, but I’ll say something about men. All of these guys, and it’s mostly men, need to also sacrifice a bunch of ego at the door.
Forget It.
Because men in this government are going to have to forget about how they look and how important they are. The most important people are going to be people who get things done. I just said it a moment ago.
You need more women to get things done.
Well, we do need more women. But you know what? We need competence and we need people to sacrifice their egos at the door and we need less noise as you’ve said. And then I promise you, everything will be fantastic. So we’ve got to seven o'clock. Spot on. Sorry, seven o'clock all over the world but in South Africa. That is it from us.
That’s it. We’re done. Thank you for joining us and I hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed spending our time with you. Thank you, everybody.
Thank you. Fantastic. Cheers, everyone. Bye-Bye
Bye.