Cinderella and the ugly sisters take it public

The South African electorate had its Cinderella moment at the May 7 Ball – briefly courted and feted. Now it’s back to the domestic drudgery of the other 364 days of the year – abused and ignored until the local elections role around in two years’ time.

Unfortunately, unlike as in the fairy tale, there is in the interim no handsome prince with a glass slipper in sight to transform its plight. And since the major political players no longer have to be on their best behaviour to seduce voters, the artifice of party unity also can immediately be dispensed with.

The African National Congress has publicly made light of its drop of four percentage points nationally. Behind the scenes, however, the tactic will be to deflect responsibility for the setback from President Jacob Zuma. One can be sure that blame will be devolving downwards and especially in Gauteng and the Western Cape, the search for scapegoats will be in full swing.

Despite a vicious ANC campaign to win back the Western Cape, the Democratic Alliance managed to parlay its precarious hold on power of five years ago into a comfortable new majority. Not only is that result a repudiation by voters of crudely race-based politic – reminiscent of the kind that the National Party excelled at in the apartheid years – but it gives the DA the chance to continue burnishing its “good governance” credentials.

While the ANC managed to cling to power in Gauteng, its vote dropped 10 percentage points to 55% in the province. What will be worrying ANC party bosses particularly was that it was even tighter in two of that province’s key metros.

It won Johannesburg with 54% and Tshwane metro, which encompasses the nation’s administrative capital of Pretoria, with only 49% of the vote. The ANC’s loss of the Western Cape to the DA in 2009 was foreshadowed by the party’s loss of Cape Town and the ANC does not want that scenario repeating itself in South Africa’s richest and most populous province.

The DA, however, also has pressing problems. The congratulatory backslapping was still in full swing, when the Sunday Times dropped the bombshell that the DA parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko had quit her job in order to take up a year-long scholarship to Harvard. To aggravate matters, Mazibuko had not only neglected to mention her intentions to the hapless electorate whose votes she had been canvassing, but she told the newspaper before she bothered to tell party leader Helen Zille.

This was clearly a calculated insult on the part of Mazibuko. It’s been obvious for months that the relationship with Zille had soured, with Zille blaming Mazibuko for the DA parliamentary debacle over the ANC’s Employment Equity Amendment Bill.

To the bemusement of everyone, including the ANC, the DA initially supported the Bill. It was only when the outrage of the rank-and-file membership became too much to bear, that the DA did an about-turn.

It is of course most unlikely that the parliamentary leader could have taken the decision to support the government on such a contentious Bill without the party leader knowing. But Zille is no less adept than Zuma at devolving blame and it was rumoured that when Parliament reconvened after the election that Mazibuko would be replaced with Zille’s newest favourite, Gauteng leader Mmusi Maimane.

Unlike the ANC, the DA has until now mostly managed to keep its internal conflicts hidden from public. The bitterness around Mazibuko’s departure, however, has sparked a public fracas.

Business Day columnist Gareth van Onselen, himself a former DA spin doctor, has long been a thorn in Zille’s flesh, with his damaging drip-torture leaks of feuds and machinations within the party. This week Van Onselen, who has made no bones of his loathing for Maimane and is clearly a fan of Mazibuko, wrote that the Mazibuko departure was indicative of a “poisonous” DA internal structure.

The party, he said, had deteriorated into an “intolerant, paranoid, fearful, vengeful and malicious” organisation. Party representatives and staff were “weak and subservient” to a “dominant and authoritarian” Zille.

The upshot of these accusations and insults being traded in the media – the DA’s communications director dismissed Van Onselen as an “embittered former party hack, obsessed with settling scores” – is a DA which doesn’t look too different from the ANC as regards internal feuding. The DA has clearly graduated into the big league, now transmogrified into one of the ugly sisters.

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