Bheki Gila
Helen Zille knows a lot of things.
Asked about the possibility of a coalition between and among the ANC, MKP and EFF, she did not hesitate to state that she will not allow such coalition to form.
She did not share how she seeks to execute such an onerous plan nor did she expose her strategy on how she will prevent it from happening.
As the elections were drawing closer to the appointed date, Zille’s party wrote to the White House in those United States, pleading for their intervention by sending monitors during elections, a request not consistent with the established electoral rules of the Republic.
It is equally uncertain what role those specific monitors would have played different from the role of the officially invited lot.
Ostensibly, bringing their power of sanctions and military might, whatever they declared would have indubitably sealed the fate of this plebiscite.
The ANC finds itself in a very unenviable position. It has been psychologically bullied and conditioned to imagine that salvaging its image can only happen with coalescing with the Democratic Alliance.
And it is at the door of this tunnel vision, that the ANC must betray its historic mandate, sellout Seme’s 1906 ‘I am an African’ exhortations, abandon the ambitions of the 1949 Action Plan, and in its last act of betrayal, tear into shards the 1955 Freedom Charter put together by the people in Kliptown.
Equally perplexing, is how the ANC interprets the mandate freely given to it by the people, or how soon they have forgotten that the essentiality of the Moonshot conspiracy is to dethrone the ANC from power in the first place.
Have pity for the ANC however.
This is Helen Zille we are talking about. And the honchos at Luthuli House may be shivering in panic, completely unable to prevent themselves from walking into Zille’s welcoming arms.
The logic of such marriage becomes even murkier when considering what will happen to the foreign policy initiatives of the incumbent, which have irked the United States and its ally Israel, to no small measure.
With the DA partnership, would South Africa continue to be in the BRICS fraternity, or it too is likely to opt out in a huff, as did Argentina?
Will the Justice Department be compelled to withdraw its genocide charge against Israel at the ICJ? But then again, these questions may not matter anymore. Maintaining power is more important than completing the second part of the National Democratic Revolution mandate.
It would be interesting to know how the ANC will reciprocate the overtures of both the EFF and the MKP.
And before we forget, the EFF or the MKP, as the case may be, each on their own are particularly vulnerable in this complex coalition jungle. Easily, this is the Rubicon moment of the ANC post 1994. All they have to do, is to cross the treacherous coalition river and be damned.
Until the ANC makes its next chess move out of this zugzwang, we are yet to find out of their last act of rebellion or hara-kiri, whichever is easier.
Or could they have already capitulated to the public musings of Rob Hersov, of a government of national unity with Mogoeng Mogoeng as its titular head? It is indeed a nail biting wait.
The plethora of experts in their collective wisdom seem to remind us on national television that investment capital and high flying money bags have a separate vote from the people.
If they don’t like the people’s vote, they insist on reordering the affairs of state or else no money shall be invested. It is an interesting extortion scheme endorsed by the most learned among us.
The mind boggles.
After all, in its quest to revitalise itself post these elections, what stops the ANC from occupying the opposition benches all on its own, and methodically run its political program free from influences that are anti-people, substituting the sovereignty of the people with the secret edicts of global capital?
Difficult as the coalition with the MKP and EFF may be, jointly or severally, it is still an ideal coalition, seeing their programs share a lot of commonalities.
However, they have been warned. And the first salvo came from the Chair of the Federal Executive Council. So in the ANC’s angst, they have walked into the emergency Top 7 room already preconditioned, making the outcome of their deliberations pitifully predictable.
Between the two extreme ends of the spectrum of Zille’s warning, it is not impossible to consider her utterances as a post electoral political joke or tactic.
And it is also a safer interpretation of them. For indeed, if they were real threats, she will have to go to extraordinary lengths and dangerous ends to carry it out.
*** Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law
*** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of Independent Media or IOL.
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