29% of UCT students vote and the radicals claim victory
Oh and guess what, the election for 2025-2026 is the same. The radicals dominated.
This year there has been a wave of crossovers from the ANC and EFF to the DA. But this accompanies other worrying changes which signal the approach of a rather dismal future.
This week Helen Zille greeted four new additions to the DA from the ANC, two of them in hung municipalities in the rural hinterland. Crucially, this includes the former provincial secretary Neville Delport. But this wouldn’t be the first crossovers from the Charterist parties. The EFF have been crossing over too.
So far this year, there are at least 38 crossings that we know of, seven of which are officebearers or local officials of significant rank. Banele Majingo, the former ANC caucus leader and opposition leader in the Cape Town council, defected in March, just before a council meeting. This move reduced ANC seats and prevented a no-confidence motion against DA Speaker Felicity Purchase. He reaffirmed that joining the DA would be a continuation of his drive for racial redress and wealth redistribution. In April, EFF Councillor Lungiswa Ntshuntshe defected, but no reasons were given. In May, EFF Councillor Nomfundiso Botya and 31 EFF members defected to the DA in Cape Town. In her resignation letter, Botya praised the DA for “prioritising basics” and their major spending on services for the poor. Then we have the four ANC leaders who left on the 5th of November: Neville Delport (former provincial secretary, citing exclusion of coloured leaders in ANC restructuring), Daniel Baadjies (former Langeberg ward councillor), Paul Strauss (former Cederberg ward councillor), and Jason Donn (former regional executive member).
The ANC dismissed them as “sleepers” undermining the party, viewing it as part of renewal efforts. They have of course reorganised the party recently, putting vocal Palestine activist and failed diplomat Ebrahim Rasool at the head, alongside a list of known corrupt candidates. But the ANC and EFF have been in decline in the province for years now, achieving no more than a quarter of the vote combined in the last election. This trend is unlikely to change, and the ANC has struggled to even hold provincial conferences in recent years.
But equally, party members do not cross over unless they can see the same reasons for being in one party as being in another. Now, none of the recent crossovers in the Cape have uttered a single word about a change of values or ideals. In fact, each of them has either announced their reasons for leaving as being based in efficiency or racial identity – Delport left because of limited opportunities for Coloured people in ANC leadership, while the rest claimed that the DA hold the same values as the ANC – Banele Majingo stated that in the DA, he will be able to be just as committed to “racial redress” and redistribution as before.
To most DA voters, this sounds incoherent. But most can recognise that these people are bad for the DA. “Maybe they will drive up black votes”, you might say. This is unlikely – only 4% of black voters support the DA, and that figure is closer to 1% in the Cape. This is using the DA’s own figures. The DA have adopted a campaigning strategy of avoiding certain black areas, because the outcome is that it drives up voter turnout in those areas, getting more votes for the EFF and ANC. Their dying support comes not from changing voters, but apathetic voters.
So why join the DA? Why would the DA accept them? I have a slightly crazy idea, but it doesn’t come from nowhere.
Absorbing crossovers is not something small parties can afford to do. Councillors stop receiving their salaries when they step down, and do not do so unless they can receive a replacement salary. Only the major parties can afford to do this. They would also not cross over unless they had some prospect of a career if they crossed over. What exactly was offered is not known, but last year, the DA declared war on the VF+ threatening to kick them out of every hung council in the province, after the Oudtshoorn VF+ branch initiated a vote of no-confidence on a mayor accused of corruption and abuse of powers, and who had been colluding with the ANC to circumvent coalition partners in passing the budget.
What fixed this war was telling – Juan van Schalkwyk, one of the most straightlaced councillors in the country, had been taking exception to corruption and abuse of powers by the Swellendam DA administration where he was Speaker. While he was soon vindicated by investigative reports, nobody has faced consequences. But in the process, he placed pressure on the DA over a scandal where an ANC member was allegedly offered a bribe to cross over to the DA, to trigger a by-election in which he would stand in the same seat for the DA. To keep the GNU afloat amid vicious attacks from the DA in the press, Pieter Groenewald and his allies had van Schalkwyk axed from the party, and everything went quiet.
But this wouldn’t be the first underhanded move the DA has made to build bridges with the ANC. Last year, Helen Zille offered to support an ANC minority government in Ekurhuleni through supply-and-confidence, so that they could govern alone, without the EFF. In exchange, they would get the same in Tshwane, and be able to ditch their own coalition partners.
And things have also been strangely copacetic in the GNU too. Whenever a white progressive or an ANC functionary has called for the head of a senior DA member since the GNU, they have folded like a house of cards – Emma Powell, Roman Cabanac, Andrew Whitfield, and now Dion George. In each department, from education to Home Affairs, the DA have eagerly implemented ANC policy, not contributing anything to the ANC’s programme at all, and in many cases celebrating ANC policy with gusto, including racialist provisions.
Even their “victories” were half-hearted. When the DA negotiate a new VAT settlement, their initial counter-offer was to make up the tax by increasing the fuel levy (same economic impact) and taxing the middle class’s medical aid policies. They only had success when they found the ANC had made a procedural error in the legislative process.
And then we got confirmation that what it looked like on the outside was in fact representative of what was happening inside, when a GNU insider confided the following to News24:
“I can’t think of anything where I would say that there was massive disagreement, or we were unable to find each other, or that we need to be worried about. There’s obviously some more discussions still to be had around international relations, and we know that some parties have different views around South Africa’s role in several conflicts. We certainly agreed that the South African has a role to play in driving a human rights approach to international matters […] This is problematic of the DA that they like to raise these issues outside of the GNU. They raise them in billboards in Johannesburg, media and press statements, but within the GNU, they don’t raise them. This is why I said there were no tensions in the room because John didn’t bring any into the room. He was collaborative, speaking about the diversification of trade and opportunities that he’s now finding in China, and he nev1er thought that he would fall in love with China. He was a very different party leader. He didn’t raise any of the issues the DA has around economic policy.”
The source, apparently a party leader, noted that the DA never disputed the BELA Act (well we could have told you that, in depth), NHI or BEE, just nodding along to every proposal like dumb party functionaries.
In a long article earlier this year, I outlined past efforts by Helen Zille and others to get the DA to merge with the ANC. These efforts have been long in the pipeline, from as early as 2012, when she saw the imminent departure of Julius Malema from the ANC following the Marikana massacre. Paring the radicals off from the mere parasites would allow the DA to take advantage of their common cause and literally merge together to form a new party which would bring all minority voters into support for the ANC’s political programme. In a 2012 interview with Chatham House, she outlined how she desired to run the country in partnership even with Jacob Zuma, so that they could help implement the ANC’s National Development Plan.
Her leaked audio from five years ago, when said it was best to consolidate support around 20-22%, and form a coalition with Ramaphosa’s ANC, whom she would far more prefer to work with than anyone else, makes clear the entire point of the DA – to capture minority support and place it behind the ANC.
The philosophy behind this is that South Africa should become the ideal model which all countries can be based on – one where affirmative action and racial pluralism is imposed upon the West, and global central planning through the UN’s Social Development Goals becomes a universal framework nobody can vote their way out of.
To make this a certainty, the DA are now pushing to eliminate all small parties from the National Assembly. In their mind, there should only be two parties – the DA/ANC complex, and a radical group of black-nationalist outsiders who can be starved of financial support and used as a bogeyman to keep minorities in line.
And as if to hammer the point home, Geordin Hill-Lewis has rammed through a plan to expropriate 50 private properties from Fish Hoek residents to house 10 000 free homes for what are inevitably going to be Eastern Cape migrants.
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