Where was the DA’s moonshot in Mangaung?

We’re less than a year away from a vital national election in which a number of opposition parties are looking to leverage a coalition to unseat the government of 30 years.

A version the Democratic Alliance (DA) is trying to spearhead has been dubbed their moonshot pact and it’s received some criticism for being somewhat dictatorial.

Whether the accusation is rooted in truth is hardly relevant in the mind of public sentiment and it was always going to be an uphill battle for the DA to change that narrative. You’d think they’d get their strategists together and at least identify some low hanging fruit.

Let’s take a fictitious case in a metro, like Mangaung, where the DA hasn’t had relatively strong numbers and are sitting with 26 seats against the ANC’s 51 in a 101-seat metro. Then let’s say an unimaginable scenario happens where eight ANC councillors vote with a DA coalition to install a DA speaker. JRR Tolkien may have been born in Bloemfontein but I’d bet not even he could make this up.

While we’re making up a great story, let’s continue with the ANC expelling the eight who voted with the DA, four of them being ward councillors, which causes a by-election. To make the story juicy, let’s have those four outed councillors run in those by-elections as independents. It’s getting good, right?

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This would be the ultimate fairy tale handed to the DA on a silver platter.

The opposition party couldn’t hit double digits in any of those wards in the last election, and it seems they need a better public image there. There’s really no hope of them winning those seats anyway and it would make them look serious about coalitions to support the independents who lost their jobs for supporting them.

Guess what? All of that is true! Wards in Mangaung went to the polls for exactly those reasons and, for reasons I wouldn’t be able to understand, team blue contested every seat.

You’d think after years of noticing the ANC’s mighty use of the tripartite alliance, the DA would think: “we have nothing to lose, we may as well throw our weight behind the people who stood behind us”. But it was not to be. Instead, the DA opted to claim its 3%, 3%, 8% and 7% in the respective wards. The independents scored 33%, 21%, 6% and 6% respectively.

It would have been the easiest showing of willingness to engage coalition partners. Sure, we never know for sure who will emerge the victor in an election, and by-elections can be dicey, but nobody can have that level of self-belief to think they will overturn single digit figures into a council seat, especially not when contesting the people who previously sat in it and the people who got them to sit in it.

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Coalitions aren’t a matter of sitting back and telling your voters to vote for somebody else, make no mistake. But when you know you’re not winning, you know your image isn’t great in some quarters and you know you need to do something about it… you shouldn’t be contesting unwinnable elections in instances where you could show favour at minimal cost.

The gods of politics rarely gift send such manna from heaven, but, when they do, it may be a good idea to give thanks and harvest it rather than building a cannon to shoot them back into the sky.

It’s inevitable that with their new majority, the ANC will put in a new speaker. So there’s not much victory for the DA to cheer about in Mangaung. Then again, there never was any expected. If they had they sided with the independents, they could have at least looked their critics in they eye and faced them with actual humility.

But who needs humility when you’re taking all of 8% in Mangaung’s ward 49?

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