The ANC has given its strongest hint yet that it has gone to bed with the EFF in Gauteng metros and elsewhere in the country.
This after months of the ruling party ducking the question about its coalition government strategy despite signs pointing to a rekindled relationship with EFF which had snubbed the ANC in favour of the DA.
Speaking to the media on Friday, ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula could not say what the party’s alliance with the EFF entails.
He confirmed that the ruling party is working with “leftist parties, including those on the extreme left [the EFF]” in an attempt to wrestle power back from the DA in Gauteng.
“Our structures have been involved in discussions with other political parties [and] forming coalitions in most of the local municipalities, and we will look into those agreements,” Mbalula said.
“We always believe that at an ideological level, we work with everybody who is on the left, but we do not work with the right.”
Mbalula said former Gauteng premier David Makhura and his team heading political education at the OR Tambo School of Leadership have been requested to assess the state of coalitions in the country and the strategic choices being made.
The team will then report back to the national executive committee.
According to Mbalula, the committee would then hold a special meeting “in the next coming weeks” where the issue of coalitions would be ironed out and a clear strategy emerge.
“Some of the coalitions have not been stable and that is what the report will also look at in detail. That report will feature Ekurhuleni too.
“There is nothing that is happening in this country in terms of coalitions that we are not aware of, we are aware of what is happening in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and elsewhere.
“We will compile that report and submit it to the national executive committee.”
The working relationship between the ANC and EFF started in Johannesburg in January when the red berets and ANC voted together to dethrone a DA mayor.
The plan was to replace the mayor with a mayoral candidate from a minority party while they shared the spoils in mayoral committee positions.
Same strategy was employed in Tshwane this week and the parties are expected to follow the same path in Ekurhuleni in April.
The newly found working relationship between the parties is, however, not sitting well with members of the governing party in the province.
In a letter addressed to President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday, ANC branch leaders in Ekurhuleni’s ward 16 warned that the ruling party will regret associating itself with the EFF.
The authors, branch secretary Jabu Mbongwa and branch chairperson Andrew Baloyi, complained that the “renewed desperation to recapture power in the aforementioned municipalities” goes against Ramaphosa’s wisdom when he said in 2022, after the municipal elections, that “we are not desperate for power, and the ANC should not be bullied by minority parties”.
In the letter to Ramaphosa, Mbongwa said “whilst there is a broad recognition that coalition alliances and regimes are not new nor unique to the ANC, the party’s ward 16 is concerned about a lack of ANC traditions, strategy and tactics, and scientific approach to managing this political task”.
“We are of the view that coalition alliances should not be viewed narrowly as brokering political power without a political strategy and without thorough analysis and identified political consequences.
“It is this analysis that should assist the movement to develop a coalition strategy and tactics [so that] the movement can be positioned to understand the provincial and national balance of forces.”
Mbongwa continued: “We are of the view that the deployed narrow approach is limited to only seizing power at all costs and lacks science. It is narrowly structured as ‘dealings’ and lacks revolutionary integrity, which could have dire political consequences.”
He said the ANC in Gauteng “may be testing poison with a tongue, especially given the history of their coalition of choice, the EFF”, and added that Malema is a “terrorist” who has a “desperate objective to destroy the ANC and remove it from power”.
Mbongwa said the EFF’s planned protest action on March 20 to remove Ramaphosa as the country’s president is one example that it cannot be trusted as an ally.
Lesego Makhubela, ANC provincial spokesperson, told Sunday World on Thursday that there is no relationship between the EFF and the ANC, and noted that both parties only work together to dismantle a coalition led by the DA.
Also read: ANC branch warns against courting EFF ahead of 2024 vote
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