ANC warned its GNU deal with the DA is bleeding black support

The ANC’s choice to share power with the DA in the Government of National Unity is costing it support in the black communities that were its strongholds, and a repeat of that arrangement after the November 4 municipal elections could push it towards irrelevance by 2029. That is the argument of a Sunday World analysis published on 6 November under the headline “How the GNU is killing the ANC while feeding the DA beast”.

The piece makes a case rather than reporting a new event, and readers should weigh it as such. Its central claim is that the ANC’s decision after the 2024 national and provincial elections, when it turned to the DA rather than to the MK Party or the EFF, has made voting for the ANC and voting for the DA look interchangeable. The analysis says that effectively told ANC voters there was nothing wrong with a party the ANC had spent years describing as a white party advancing white interests.

From there, the argument runs, black voters in townships and black middle-class constituencies have moved directly to the DA. The analysis describes those votes as real and cites the confirmation of ANC party agents and counting observers that DA support in black communities was genuine, rather than the product of manipulation. It credits the DA with an effective and well-funded election machine.

The piece also points to policy. It notes that the DA openly rejects the BEE, NHI, Expropriation Act and BELA positions associated with the ANC, and argues that the alliance handed the blue party an advantage it could not have won on its own.

On the alternative the ANC did not take, the analysis is blunt. It calls the argument that governing with the MK Party or the EFF would have hollowed out the ANC flawed, and says that route would probably have let the ANC recover, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal. Bringing the EFF into state power, it says, would have pushed that party towards oblivion, and the MK Party’s record of internal instability since its formation in December 2023 would have been exposed in government and repelled its voters.

Looking ahead, the analysis expects most metros and district municipalities to be hung after the municipal polls, and says the same GNU arrangement may be on the cards again. If the ANC chooses the DA once more, it argues, that could be the final nail in its political coffin ahead of the 2029 national and provincial elections, with a head of state from DA ranks no longer far-fetched and a figure such as billionaire Patrice Motsepe possibly contesting outside ANC colours with DA endorsement.

What the piece does not carry is any vote figure, seat count or municipality-level result from the November 4 elections to support its claims about the scale of the DA’s gains. Nor does it name the ANC agents and observers whose confirmation it cites. Those are gaps a reader should hold in mind. The analysis is an argument about direction, and the numbers that would settle it are not in it.

For South African voters, the practical question the piece raises is the one that will be answered in the coalition talks now beginning in councils across the country: whether the ANC treats the DA as a partner it can keep, or as the arrangement its own supporters are punishing it for.