ANC national chair Gwede Mantashe has shot down the EFF’s proposal to give the governing party a share of its electoral support on condition that EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu is appointed minister of finance.
The informal proposal to the governing party was publicly made by EFF president Julius Malema in an interview with JJ Tabane on Frank Dialogue.
Malema repeated in a media engagement on Friday that Shivambu would be the ideal candidate to oversee the public purse, citing his three master’s degrees and his participation in parliament’s standing committee on finance.
Mantashe told Business Day: “Where I have influence I will never accept Floyd as a minister of finance because that is an outright formula for looting.”
He did not elaborate or provide evidence.
Mantashe, who is also minister of mineral resources & energy, said the ANC was campaigning for an outright majority and was not considering coalitions or a partnership with any other party.
However, the ANC is facing its toughest elections yet amid growing frustration over energy, logistics, transport, crime and corruption — all factors that will play a crucial role in shaping this year’s economic growth prospects.
Various polls indicate that the governing party’s share of the vote will decline to below 50%, forcing it to go into coalitions with smaller opposition parties.
An EFF-ANC coalition or partnership after the May 29 polls is not implausible as the two parties have formed working agreements in hung municipalities countrywide.
Through informal coalition agreements with the ANC and other smaller parties since 2021, the EFF has been able to place its members as MMCs in municipalities countrywide, including Joburg, Ekurhuleni, Mogale City and Nelson Mandela Bay and as deputy mayor in Nongoma, KwaZulu-Natal.
Recently, the newly elected mayor in Ekurhuleni, Nkosindiphile Xhakaza of the ANC, complained that its coalition pact with the EFF was “more damaging than helpful”, but appointed five EFF councillors to portfolios of his 10-member mayoral cabinet.
ANC research shows the EFF is still growing in by-elections, “mainly in the traditional base of the ANC; its growth is levelling up below 20%".
“We can’t have [Shivambu] as finance minister because the experience in Ekurhuleni tells me that we must never do it,” Mantashe said, adding that the agreement between the ANC and the EFF in the region “reflects a disagreement between the region and the province”.
“On the land issue we agree with the EFF; the only difference is whether land should be given to the people or the state. They wanted it to belong to the state,” Mantashe said.
“Our drive is to win with an outright majority ... coalitions are not a plan but a consequence.”
Market players locally and internationally are keeping a close eye on the country before the elections.
Inroads
Business Day has previously reported that SA’s largest asset manager, Ninety One, estimated that an ANC-EFF coalition would shift the country radically to the left, while an ANC agreement with the DA would leave things about the same.
Newly formed uMkhonto weSizwe, which is led by former president Jacob Zuma, is expected to make electoral inroads, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma’s home province. The area is also where MK has centralised its campaign since launching in December 2023.
Mantashe has been part of the ANC’s top six for 20 years, having previously served as secretary-general from 2007 to 2017 under Zuma. He has said the former president formed MK because he “hates Cyril with [a] passion to the point of saying the ANC belongs to Cyril”.
“One thing that Zuma does successfully is to play himself as a victim. He is very good at that and everyone sympathises with a victim — and his movement to the MK is the same.
“I didn’t think that he would go to the extreme of going to another party,” he said.
“They [MK] are more of a spoiler than a threat in that [the party] will eat support from some areas and from the EFF.” MK “is not a factor except in KwaZulu-Natal”.
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