On Friday, 4 December 2020, Nelson Mandela Bay’s council was finally able to elect a new mayor, the DA’s Nqaba Bhanga. Almost immediately the Cooperative Governance MEC in the province, the ANC’s Xolile Nqata, wrote him a letter in which he claimed that the election was illegal. This follows a trend in which various parties in Nelson Mandela Bay appear intent on denying others power when they cannot exercise it themselves. It also follows the actions of the Gauteng Provincial Government in trying to remove the DA from power in Tshwane. Those actions failed, but this kind of turmoil is likely to only grow in the aftermath of next year’s local elections.

There can be no doubting the political turmoil in Nelson Mandela Bay. It was without a mayor for a year after the UDM’s Mongameli Bobani was removed. During that time numerous attempts were made to call meetings and cobble informal coalitions together.

At one stage the speaker of the council, the ANC’s Bulelwa Mafaya, refused to hold a meeting at which the mayoral election could proceed. This went on for several months until the DA went to court.

Eventually, a council meeting was held. During this meeting several men arrived in the council chamber and appeared to forcibly remove Mafaya from her seat. But one of those men was her bodyguard. She later claimed from hospital that she had been assaulted and that the meeting had to be cancelled.

On the DA’s version of events, the councillors rejected that as an attempt to stop the meeting from going ahead. Instead, the acting city manager presided over the meeting and the election of the Patriotic Alliance’s Marlon Daniels as acting speaker, who then presided over the election of Bhanga. The DA says it has video evidence to prove its version of events.

Then Nqata claimed that Bhanga had been elected illegally, because the acting city manager should have presided over his mayoral election.

Bhanga says that Nqata’s letter has no legal force or effect (he described it as a love letter) and challenged Nqata to go to court.

Nqata may find himself in a difficult position in the court of public opinion. The accusation against him is that he failed to act at all during the period when the city did not have a mayor. Despite repeated requests, he allowed both the governance and the political situation in the city to deteriorate.

He only acted when a party that is not the ANC was able to take power.

This follows what may be an unfortunate pattern by the ANC.

In Gauteng earlier this year, just before the pandemic struck, the Cogta MEC there, Lebogang Maile, took Tshwane into administration when its DA mayor Stevens Mokgalapa resigned. That left the city without a mayor, an acting mayor, a city manager and a speaker. Maile appointed an administrator, Mpho Nawa, who ended up running the city, as an unelected official imposed by the province for a period beyond the 90 days stipulated in the law. This is because by-elections could not be held during the time of the hard lockdowns.

The DA then won a series of judgments. First, the High Court in Tshwane ruled that Maile’s actions were illegal. When he appealed, that same court allowed the DA to implement its ruling while the appeal was being heard. Then, the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the DA. Maile now wants to go to the Constitutional Court.

In the meantime, the DA has a new mayor in Tshwane and has accused Nawa of mismanaging the city’s finances (he strongly denies this).

There is some evidence to suggest that the politics of local government and particularly the metros will see smaller parties playing a more important part in formal and informal coalitions in the bigger cities during next year’s local elections.

The recent by-elections have seen organisations like the Land Party, Al Jama-ah and the Patriotic Alliance winning wards, in some cases for the first time. This may be part of a process in which the ethnic identity of some voters is coming to the fore because of the weaknesses of the ANC and the DA.

The ANC, of course, is beset by infighting to a degree never before seen, as it decides on issues around its secretary-general. At the same time, its image has been badly tarnished by PPE procurement corruption. And in Joburg, the mayor and leader of the ANC’s Joburg region, Geoff Makhubo, has claimed there was no conflict of interest when he benefited financially from decisions made by the city when he was in charge of its finances.

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All of this suggests there is a strong chance that some of the bigger cities will have complicated governance arrangements beyond the 2021 elections. At the same time, the ANC might well lose power in some municipalities. And the informal coalitions so far have been very unstable, liable to fall apart at any moment.

But the governments in the provinces won’t change next year – the ANC will still run eight provinces and the DA the ninth one.

This means that the temptation for the ANC to take over remaining cities and metros will be huge, especially considering that governance in the cities is alleged to be an important source of patronage and money. If there is the slightest chance of taking a city into administration, leaders in the provinces will find that their members demand it because of these opportunities.

The courts will be used by opposition parties, as the DA has already done in Tshwane, to stop this from happening.

And so the next few years in local government are likely to see much more turmoil. There will be more divided informal coalitions, provinces waiting to jump into the power vacuum, and courts being dragged into political disputes.

Of course, nothing is certain. As Professor Ivor Sarakinsky from the Wits School of Governance has noted, if parties preparing to govern together sign coalition agreements with mechanisms to resolve disputes there could be more stability. And if voters give parties proper majorities in the metros this may be averted (although the ANC is so divided this is unlikely).

Our politics is entering a new, uncertain phase, with the two biggest parties showing signs of possibly terminal infighting. This is also part of a much bigger process around the splintering of constituencies. The net result is likely to be more intense arguments, a discord around identity, and poorer governance at a time when our social and economic hardships are only increasing. DM