ActionSA warns that unless 'sense' prevails, Ekurhuleni will return to ANC

Opposition parties' ambition to keep the ANC out of power in the DA-led Ekurhuleni metro may fail unless some agreement is reached with the EFF.

On Monday, ActionSA raised concern over the coalition arrangement, which it said was “unlikely to survive the coming months, resulting in handing this municipality back to the ANC”.

The DA-led multiparty government falls short of the threshold needed to pass the municipal budget. If the budget is not passed in time, it could affect the delivery of services to more than 4-million residents.

The only party with the numbers needed for the partnership to reach this majority — other than the ANC, which was relegated to the opposition benches after the local government elections last year — is the EFF.

ActionSA national chairperson Michael Beaumont dismissed suggestions that he was trying to bring the EFF into a coalition agreement. 

“As ActionSA, we are trying to make sure that our coalitions last and deliver services to people they are meant to. And our commitment is to work with as many parties as possible to ensure that is delivered,” he said.

“The truth is that when you look into Ekurhuleni, it’s a mathematical solution. You cannot find a solution for Ekurhuleni that does not involve some kind of working relationship with the EFF. That is a mathematical truth of the configuration of Ekurhuleni. ActionSA does not believe any solution based on ANC support is realistic.”

The DA was aware of the crisis and had asked ActionSA to reach out to the EFF in a bid to have that needed majority. This claim has since been dismissed by the DA’s federal chairperson Helen Zille on social media. 

“It is disingenuous to claim that the DA asked ActionSA to approach the EFF to bring it into any form of agreement 'to keep the coalition alive'. Implying that we were prepared to consciously bring the EFF into government is a distortion of the truth,” she wrote on Facebook.

Despite the fears of an imminent motion of no confidence and disagreements, ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba said they would not jump ship.

“We are not going to walk away from this coalition arrangement. We hope that some sense can prevail, it must be in the national interest,” he said.

ActionSA said it had always had concerns about entering into coalition arrangements with parties that would not result in a majority.

“When the arrangements were being concluded, ActionSA expressed reservations about the lack of clarity around how such support could be obtained to prevent us entering into a doomed arrangement. We were assured that every effort would be made and, in good faith, we accepted this and joined the arrangement.

“Recent events, however, demonstrate that this commitment to attempt to build a stable coalition in Ekurhuleni may have been a hollow commitment to keep the ANC out of Ekurhuleni,” said Mashaba.

The party would engage the residents of Ekurhuleni on whether they want coalition parties “to work at arm’s length of the EFF ... to keep your municipality out of ANC hands and delivering services”, or if they would prefer the coalition parties to “refuse to work with the EFF, even at arm’s length ... and allow the municipality to return to the ANC”.

“It is our belief that the residents of Ekurhuleni will tell parties what they and everyone else has to do in their respective workplaces; work with people that you may not like but that you need to work alongside for the greater good,” said Mashaba. 

“We continue to assert that the success of these coalitions will be integral to voter turnout in 2024.

“The ANC’s decline is accelerating, and this has to be matched by a corresponding confidence in an alternative — which can only be a coalition in which voters believe in its prospect to replace a failing ANC at national and provincial governments. This is what is at stake in these local government coalitions arising from 2021.”

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