The DA is throwing its weight behind a draft legislation currently before parliament that would set a minimum vote threshold for parties entering municipal councils, with both its Tshwane and Ekurhuleni mayoral candidates arguing that the reform is the only credible fix for the coalition dysfunction strangling South Africa’s biggest cities.
The Local Government Municipal Structures Amendment Bill would require parties to clear a minimum percentage of the vote before winning seats in council chambers.
Both Cilliers Brink, the DA’s Tshwane candidate, and Khathutshelo Rasilingwane, his counterpart in Ekurhuleni, said a 1% threshold, standard in most proportional representation systems, would transform the arithmetic of local government.
Brink said applying it to Johannesburg would reduce the council from 19 parties to around nine or ten. In Ekurhuleni, he said, the figure would fall from twelve to five or six.
This would change the electoral system that rewards fragmentation and allows tiny parties to extract influence.
“That just makes these governments more manageable,” Brink said in a joint interview with Business Day.
The DA is fielding named mayoral candidates in all three Gauteng metros ahead of local government elections expected later this year, aiming to replicate its previous success where the ANC lost its outright majority in the country’s major cities.
The 2016 municipal elections handed the party its biggest opening in a generation, stripping the ANC of its majorities in Johannesburg and Tshwane. What followed was a decline in voter participation rather than a consolidation of that shift. Brink said that pattern, more than any single electoral result, has defined the trajectory of local government since.
“At the very moment when there was a possibility of change, people start withdrawing from the system in greater numbers,” he said. “That has shaped our politics more than anything else.”
In Ekurhuleni, the city has cycled through coalition arrangements that he said were never built on principle, with smaller parties securing council positions disproportionate to their voter support and consistently gravitating back toward the ANC when it suited them, Rasilingwane said.
“They always run back to the ANC and just become a proxy for the ANC,” she said.
She also backed the Municipal Structures Amendment Bill as the legislative fix, arguing a 1% threshold would force voters to make a real choice rather than distribute support across parties with no credible governing mandate. The current system, she said, had produced a council where a party that secured a few thousand votes could determine the mayoralty.
“We will be encouraging residents to move away from voting for smaller parties,” she said, “because it distracts us from the focus we are trying to achieve.”
The city carries R13bn in unpaid supplier debt. A R2.1bn billing crisis linked to fraud in the ICT department remains unresolved. Officials suspended for misconduct continue to draw salaries years after being stood down.
“We cannot run a city when there is no consequences management,” she said.
Both candidates backed Geordin Hill-Lewis, widely expected to be confirmed as the DA’s new federal leader when the party convenes for its Congress over the upcoming weekend, arguing that his decision to stay out of cabinet would allow him to speak without the constraints of collective government responsibility in a way that could sharpen the party’s message going into the vote.
- Additional reporting by Hajra Omarjee
Business Day
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