ANC NEC meets for tense discussions on coalitions

The ANC will have to consider external voices who have raised glaring concerns about possible coalition arrangements it is likely to decide on during its national executive committee (NEC) meeting which is under way on Thursday.

The party is deliberating on which partners it should enter a coalition with for the seventh administration. 

Part of the conundrum is the plurality of voices which have emerged both internally and otherwise. The main discussion is centred on a possible tie-up with the DA.

TimesLIVE understands the ANC’s top officials will propose a government of national unity as a first option during the deliberations. 

The NEC is the party's highest decision-making body between conferences. 

All parties are constitutionally mandated to decide on a government within 14 days after the declaration of the elections. This means the ANC has 10 days to decide on who enters its coalition pact.

The ANC lost the election but retained the lion's share of the vote with 40%. It is followed by the DA which received 21%, while the new entrant, the Jacob Zuma-led MK Party, overtook the EFF as the third-largest party, walking away with 14%.  

Should the NEC sitting in Boksburg agree, the next government could have the ANC, DA, EFF and other smaller parties. However, it would need to convince an unflinching DA to agree to the terms. 

Several NEC members, including KwaZulu-Natal heavyweight Zweli Mkhize, have publicly expressed displeasure at the prospects of an ANC/DA coalition. 

Its alliance partners, the SACP and Cosatu, have added their voices to the debate, warning  that an arrangement with the DA could fracture the alliance and derail its agenda of advancing the working class. 

The Black Business Council (BBC) has written a letter to ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula warning about the possibility of the transformation agenda being reversed.

In a letter dated June 6, the BBC said the election results had presented the country with a “watershed moment” with the ANC losing its outright majority.

“The threat of reversing the hard-fought transformation policy gains of the last three decades is real,” the BBC said in its letter.

The ANC often consults the BBC, a forum considered as the custodian of black transformation in the economic sector.  

The council argues that the two parties are diametrically opposed at ideological and pragmatic levels, and would find it difficult to explain their union to their constituencies.

“At a policy level, a union between the ANC and the DA threatens the many gains the ANC made over the last decade,” it said.

According to the BBC, the DA campaigned on repealing progressive and race-based legislation, including the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act, the National Health Insurance Act and the Expropriation Bill, and removing racial targets from the Employment Equity Act and the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act. 

Repealing these acts and policies would lead to a regression at a time when more transformation and redress are needed, it said. 

“The optics won’t look good,” it said. “Given South Africa’s past and current economic divide, the so-called merit-based system the DA is proposing will favour white people with historically better resources to the detriment of the black majority.”

Speaking on the sidelines of the NEC meeting, Mbalula said those who were airing their displeasure at a coalition with the DA were putting the cart before the horse. He said protests aimed at dissuading the ANC from a possible tie-up with the DA were based on misinformation.

“The question of the strategic framework is going to look into the outcome of the election which as we all know does not favour the ANC,” he said. 

Mbalula said the ANC was consulting parties who received a significant number of voters in the elections for a possible coalition. 

Whatever the party decides, the ANC would still want to implement its manifesto priorities, he said.

“We have engaged with everybody, and we’re still talking to others, even smaller parties, because we want to bring everybody on board because South Africans want us to work together for their sake. And we have said, as the ANC we will prioritise the people. We don’t want instability, we want a stable government,” said Mbalula.

“Also, we have got keen interest in terms of seeing through our manifesto being implemented. What these 6-million people have voted for. They have voted for continuity, they’ve voted for more jobs, expansion of social protection. They have voted for growth and jobs for the economy and all of that. So that is what really is important.”