Junior Lebese
A bone-chillingly racist coalition agreement is apparently being entered into between the ANC and the DA.
Just as the 2024 election results were coming in, Bloomberg, along with many mainstream and Sunday papers, has suddenly started promoting this ANC-DA coalition, and there is a significant reason for this shift. Reports are that leaders of the two political parties are currently busy with backdoor negotiations for the coalition, and some framework to sell to both parties supporters have been agreed to.
The deal, as reported by the Sunday Independent, stipulates that the DA will take over parliament, which provides oversight function to the Executive.
The DA will run the national assembly, while the ANC, on the other hand, runs the Executive and take all the ministerial positions and run them “undisturbed”.
This looks sensible, right? No, far from it.
It would be unheard of for a “liberation movement” to enter into a coalition with the main “opposition,” whose historical part is etched in the apartheid era, and whose policies it vehemently opposes.
The DA has never changed, nor has it ever pretended to want to change. Its policies are clear: to guard the interests of whites and white capital. Where the DA governs, the interests of whites come first, leaving blacks neglected and at the periphery. We have seen this in Gugulethu, Soshanguve, Hammanskraal, and municipalities where the DA governs.
Yet, the media and analysts have been promoting this marriage of convenience for a reason.
The devil is in the details.
The white DA controlling “law-making” and providing oversight on blacks is direct supervision of blacks by the “baas” is jarring, irrespective of how you want to look at it.
The optics and the principle are wrong, irrespective of the justification. Someone born and familiar with South Africa’s historical past could see the racial subtext of this deal from a mile away. F
or someone to accept that whites must supervise blacks just because some politicians want to preserve the “blue-lights” is worse than Jan van Riebeek’s “mirror for land deal” of 1652.
The fearmongering that there will be a flight of capital investment if there is a coalition between the black parties to form the government is a stratagem to put pressure on the deal to be accepted irrespective of the views.
The racist sub-text suggests that blacks need white supervision to attract investment or to have leadership acceptable to “investors.”
Why must capital investment follow the race of the leadership of the country rather than financial returns? South Africans, and any self-respecting black person, must reject that notion.
In fact, everyone must reject investors who put “racist” conditions on bringing their money into the country.
Never has one thought we will witness the reversal of any post-1994 gains in our lifetime.
The ANC and liberation parties fought against apartheid for a reason, and back then, the DA was part of that apartheid government.
Today, we are witnessing a watershed moment of the return of whites to power via backdoor deals made by politicians and forced by white businesses or “investors”.
The votes are now treated like casino chips, used and traded by political parties we entrusted with governing us. Our votes are used as leverage and traded for convenient deals, disregarding the voter, and their decisions.
Helen Zille, the Federal Executive Council chairperson of the DA, has made it clear that she aims to stop the ANC’s alliance with the smaller, especially black political parties. Why?
The promotion and acceptance of the ANC-DA coalition by the white mainstream media reveal a deeper agenda. Whites will finally have what they have always wanted: to be in control and in charge of blacks through “democratic institutions.”
With the DA having hit its electoral performance plateau at 22%, it needed more creative ways to take control of power. The drop of the ANC to under 50% of the vote nationally has presented that opportunity.
The ANC-DA coalition is racist to the core, no matter how beautifully it is dressed up by media and public relations pundits. It is like an exotic snake that looks like a pet - but poisonous.
The ANC must not fall for this deal, which is similar to the “exchanges of land and birthright for the mirror”.
Running tenders and having bodyguards and blue lights should not supersede the historical objective of the ANC, especially its founding fathers. During the apartheid era, while the DA (the Progressive Party) was enjoying being a lame “opposition” in parliament, many black heroes and heroines died fighting for freedom.
The ANC-DA deal, irrespective of how it is packaged, can only benefit those who have carefully planned and engineered it: and those people are not the ANC.
This agreement is nothing more than a façade, and its acceptance would signify the destruction of the hard-fought gains of the post-apartheid era, especially for the ANC voter.
The ANC-DA alliance must be rejected, irrespective of how it is sold and packaged. When did we move from “the people shall govern” to “the minority shall govern the majority”?
*** Junior Lebese is a pseudonym of a long-serving member of the ANC in good standing, and a social commentator. He writes in his personal capacity.
** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of Independent Media or IOL
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