DA federal council chair Helen Zille said the party was shocked, just like everyone else, when the EFF voted with the DA to reinstall councillor Tania Campbell as executive mayor of Ekurhuleni during a dramatic council meeting on Tuesday.
The EFF, which has 31 seats in council, voted with the DA multiparty coalition, which holds 93 seats.
This allowed Campbell to snatch back the mayoral chain with 124 votes, trouncing ANC Ekurhuleni deputy regional chair Jongizizwe Dlabathi, who received 99 votes. There was one spoilt vote.
In an interview with Business Day on Wednesday, Zille said: “We didn’t expect it. It was an anti-ANC vote.”
A council meeting called on November 2 to elect a new mayor collapsed after the ANC and EFF could not agree on a mayoral candidate. The EFF wanted to field the party’s Gauteng chair and caucus leader, Nkululeko Dunga, and wanted the ANC to support Dunga. But the ANC wanted Dlabathi, the party’s caucus leader, to be mayor.
Zille said last-minute negotiations to hammer out a deal between the ANC and EFF “broke down in the early hours of Tuesday morning, after which the EFF instructed their councillors to vote for us”.
Campbell was removed through an ANC-sponsored motion of no confidence on October 26, leaving the city without a permanent political head for more than two weeks, resulting in heaps of rubbish left uncollected across the metro’s suburbs and townships, among other service-delivery challenges experienced.
Her removal highlighted the instability of coalition governments, as there is no legal framework upon which they are established and agreed on. Political pundits have described coalitions as largely about staying in power rather than addressing service delivery.
Zille said the EFF did not consult the DA about its plans to vote with the multiparty coalition government.
“No-one that I have spoken to knows anything about an EFF approach on Saturday. I spoke to Tania [Campbell]. She says there was no EFF approach. I spoke to [DA Gauteng leader] Solly Msimanga and Thomas Walters and they both said the same thing,” she said.
“There was no EFF approach, [much] less any negotiated agreement. As I said, the ANC and EFF negotiated till the early hours of Tuesday morning, so the EFF was talking to the ANC, not to us. Their vote later on Tuesday was an anti-ANC vote, not a pro-DA vote.”
Zille stressed that the DA did not know how the red berets were going to vote.
“They do not ask our permission. We don’t ask them to vote for us. They vote as they choose,” Zille said.
ANC Ekurhuleni chair and former executive mayor Mzwandile Masina told journalists on Tuesday that his party negotiated with all the parties in council, except for the DA and ActionSA. There were a set of proposals that were discussed.
“The few that were uniting us was that the ANC with its capacity and presence in wards, should take the lead in terms of executive authority and work with others; the second option was that we co-govern,” he said, adding, however, that there were “some parties” that were hell-bent on getting the mayoral chain at all cost.
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