We are not DA proxies and we will never allow ourselves to be bullied by you

By: Gayton McKenzie

Dear John Steenhuisen

Allow me to thank you for your two-page missive received yesterday. It is unfortunate
that your telephone inexplicably became unreachable in the two days prior to its arrival, but it is at least reassuring that your letter provides some evidence that you have
remained alive and well throughout.

I am sure the residents of Johannesburg will appreciate the many, many days of consideration that you have given to who governs them in the metro.

Allow me to respond to each of the points you raised and helpfully numbered in your
letter.

I am including your words to us in italics for clarity’s sake.

1) There is currently no coalition in Johannesburg. There are also no coalition structures with formal status. When the first motion of no confidence (MONC) in our Johannesburg coalition succeeded last year, the precedent was established that when a government falls, the coalition is dissolved and must be reconstituted in the event the opportunity to return to government re-opens.

Mr Steenhuisen, you are correct only insofar as you have adducted that there is currently no coalition involving YOU in Johannesburg. There is, however, a coalition involving OTHER parties. I was under the impression that the reason YOU reached out
to ME to begin discussions was to change this fact. Perhaps I misunderstood why I was
asked to attend a personal meeting with you in Cape Town right after the long weekend
when I had no intention of going to Cape Town, and then another meeting at your
offices in Johannesburg a week and a half later when I had no intention of being in
Johannesburg.

However, in the spirit of collegial politics and despite the many insults that your party has brainstormed against my party and me personally over the past two years, I attended in good spirit. I mention this since none of the issues that you raise as misgivings against my party, and by extension me, were unknown to you prior to you asking to talk to me – so perhaps you should have considered whether you might be able to climb those mountains of difference between us before deciding to completely waste my time.

2) Since our removal from office in the second MONC this year, there have been no
coalition negotiations in Johannesburg of which we are aware. At least there have been none that involved the DA. Mr Steenhuisen, you are correct on this point.

3) From our perspective there was only the frank, honest exchange of views between the DA and other parties in Johannesburg at the meeting of 19th April. This discussion did not constitute negotiations.

Mr Steenhuisen, since this letter has been signed by you despite your use of the
pronoun “we”, it is both disappointing and instructive to learn from you that the direct
discussions I had with you as the leader of your party have now been dismissed by you.
In fact, they seem to totally lack existence, since you appear to only recognise or remember exchanges with me when they involve meetings that include one or more of your colleagues.

One can therefore only conclude that any interactions with you directly are a waste of time and any interactions with the DA only gain significance when you are supported by any other individual from your party.

4) The DA has repeatedly stated its position that we do not undertake coalition negotiations on-the-run, nor do we form governments in rushed circumstances, without reaching a prior negotiated agreement with other parties.

Mr Steenhuisen, the PA shares your view that we do not like doing last-minute things, which is why I agreed earlier this month to start interacting with you at the earliest opportunity. The business of politics, you might know, moves quickly and one must be willing to keep pace with it even if it is not moving at the pace you might personally
prefer.

I must say that we find it interesting that you are now holding this position of not
wanting to negotiate “on the run” when members of your party came to us offering us whatever positions we might want when the first motion of no confidence against your mayor in Joburg was about to pass. We said at the time that we would not sell our souls in that way and would not agree to last-minute desperate offers.

5) Our experience in Johannesburg and elsewhere has underscored the point that we cannot be pressured into rushed negotiations. Coalitions in Gauteng have been extremely unstable, resulting in a loss of confidence in the very concept of coalitions. We need to guarantee stability going forward if we want to revive the credibility of coalition
governments.

Mr Steenhuisen, if me attending meetings that YOU and Corne Mulder invited me to made you feel pressured, I’m not sure how I should respond to that. I am sorry you felt pressured by yourself or Dr Mulder (which I saw no sign of, so it must have been yourself).

Let me be clear that I was happily carrying on with my own life when I was asked to meet with you and I have not asked for any coalitions to be changed in Gauteng. I merely wanted a mayor with more capacity to lead the City of Johannesburg, whoever that may turn out to be, which I still believe is the right call to make, and which I still intend to see through to the end – with or without your help.

6) So far in our discussions, you have made it clear that you do not share a commitment to coalition stability grounded in shared values. Indeed, you were clear and unambiguous about that, which we appreciated.

Mr Steenhuisen, you called that meeting where the PA was cross-examined and we answered you as best we could. As I recall, we made it clear that we feel that parties in a coalition should be respected, not insulted and threatened with the courts, and not accused of ulterior motives without evidence. When someone doesn’t agree with you, or takes exception to being insulted by your party, that does not mean they lack values.

This may surprise you, but the DA does not have a monopoly on good values or how these should be defined, and the PA will not be told we lack virtue simply because we
refuse to be bullied by other parties, including yours.

7) You will also be aware that the DA cannot support or participate in any government that is based on a short-term jockeying for positions. Instead, we seek long-term stability in values-based coalition agreements, that are respected as binding by all parties.

Mr Steenhuisen, if all the parties to a coalition merely went along with agreeing to governing with you according to values that you define, we might end up all being spectators to a DA government running every department. The only reason other parties end up co-governing with you is that they negotiate for those positions with you as part of a power-sharing arrangement.

It’s quite astonishing that it’s necessary to explain this to you. How is one to reach agreement on which positions should go to which party without the “jockeying for
positions” that must take place, and which you seem to find so distasteful?
Furthermore, if the only thing the PA ever does is to vote in response to being offered
something, what were we offered to vote with you last week for your budget in Tshwane?Nothing. We did that to show you that we can support the DA and are not the lapdogs of the ANC, which I suspect you already know.

8) The existing arrangements the PA has with the ANC in other parts of the country, confirm to us that you are unwilling to position yourselves unequivocally outside the ambit of the ANC.

Mr Steenhuisen, on numerous occasions the PA has both reached out to your party and been receptive to overtures from your party to conclude coalition agreements with the DA in every single municipality where we have representation. If you would like to see the correspondence relating to this, we are more than happy to share this with you. The DA has instead chosen not to work with us and to embrace the lie that the PA is little more than a proxy for the ANC. Last month we even voted against the ANC removing your mayor and Freedom Front Plus’ speaker in Karoo Hoogland when we had nothing to personally gain from supporting you. Even in this latest round of talks with you, we made it clear that we are willing to support your governance of Tshwane, Nelson Mandela Bay and numerous other hung municipalities and that we should work to repair our relationship.

I am concerned that when you say you expect us to “position ourselves unequivocally outside the ambit of the ANC”, that you are asking us to become nothing more than the whipping boys and the proxies of the DA. That would be wonderful for you and catastrophic for us. Allow me to also point out the inherent hypocrisy of your letter to me, since in the one breath you tell the South African public that you would consider a coalition between the ANC and the EFF a “doomsday” coalition that must be prevented at all costs. You are trying to sell this idea as the pretext for why you and your party would yourselves be willing to sign up to a coalition with the ANC, if you can convince them to work with you. But according to your definition we are ALREADY seeing a doomsday pact between the ANC and EFF in Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and numerous other municipalities and you seem not only
unalarmed by this, but fighting hard for your right to be “unrushed” in your response to it.

Perhaps it would be more honest for you to level with the South African voter and be honest that you are not interested in unseating the ANC by any means necessary when you are offered the opportunity to do so.

Finally, I must also note and point out that you, Mr Steenhuisen, invited parties such as the UDM that have not “unequivocally positioned” themselves outside the ambit of the ANC to your so-called moonshot pact discussions. You did not invite the PA and have continued to ignore the PA despite my public pronouncements that I am willing to bring the PA to the table with you and the other parties ahead of next year’s elections. Perhaps you should be honest with the South African public about what you are really hoping to achieve with your shots at the moon before it starts to seem more like just barking at the moon.

9) We are also aware that, as you were exploring the possibility of re-establishing your relationship with the former coalition partners in Johannesburg, the PA in Nelson Mandela Bay co-signed a petition with ANC/EFF and their allies, to call a special Council meeting to remove a MONC in the Mayor, Retief Odendaal.

Mr Steenhuisen, why are you now also not equally aware of my repeated assurance to you that NMB would remain as it is should we find each other as coalition partners in
Johannesburg and elsewhere? I have heard of selective attention, and I suppose we must
now add “selective awareness” to our lexicon.

10) We believe it is common cause that Mayor Odendaal has done excellent work in holding the 10-party coalition together, so that it can make a visible difference in service delivery.

This further underscored our concerns regarding the prospects of any renewed coalition in Johannesburg. Mr Steenhuisen, if he is doing such an excellent job in holding that coalition together, then you should have nothing to fear from us as the PA doing anything against him there. Let us see how excellent he will continue to be in this respect.

11) “We are willing to revisit any discussion with the PA once all governments where you are currently propping up the ANC are in the hands of a multiparty opposition coalition (involving the DA and reliable partners that share our core values); and once all current investigations into the Beaufort West Public Protectors’ findings, where the PA has some serious questions to answer, are concluded.”

Mr Steenhuisen, we have always been clear as a political party that we are willing to work with any other party. If we now allow ourselves to be dictated to by the likes of you who we should and should not work with, we are ceding our independence to you. We worked too hard and made too many sacrifices to be here today, often in the face of endless lies and insults against us by the DA. Why do you not first have a quick remonstration with yourself about your own publicly stated willingness (or even eagerness) to go into a coalition next year with the ANC before coming to me and telling me who I should and should not be talking to.

Secondly, what “findings” of the Public Protector are you referring to? No findings have ever been made against the PA by the Public Protector. As you well know, complaints are lodged against public officials to the Public Protector every day.

Hundreds of such complaints have been levelled against your party with this institution and some of them have proven to be well-grounded. Adverse findings have been made against the DA wherever they have governed. Should we as the PA refuse to work with the DA because you have misgoverned on various occasions? Who would we have left to work with if we could only talk to those who have never fallen foul of the Public Protector, which you have done and, to date, we have not.

12) We hope that the above offers the prospect for you to reconsider your current
positioning on the question of coalitions.
Mr Steenhuisen, I do not know what aspects of your letter give you any cause for hope.
Nevertheless, unlike you, if you call me again I will answer the phone. I will, of course, first give a big sigh. But then I will pick up and say, “Hello John, how are you?” Perhaps someday you will be able to first get over yourself and then we can get over the much smaller hurdle of working together.

We appreciate the frank exchange with the PA. This has enabled us to convey our position with commensurate frankness. I’m glad you were able to get those things off your chest and are feeling better now. All
the best.

Gayton McKenzie is the President of the Patriotic Alliance (PA)