The MK Party and the EFF also failed to secure seats at the table partly due to their alleged barking of orders to the ANC about their preferences in the former ruling party’s top leadership structures.
“I think we knew that the EFF was in trouble. We knew what they want: to be in government… either for Julius Malema to be deputy president and for Floyd Shivambu for Minister of Finance. They even called for us to be surgically removed as a party,” said Mbalula.
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He added:
We were not going to negotiate with them, begging them for anything. It’s either take it or leave it. And then they came with that arrogance, which is water under the bridge now. First, they said to us: ‘You’re a dying party; you’re better off if you die in our hands than with others.’ You don’t talk to people like that. Respect was out of the window.
Mbalula relayed a story about negotiating with Zille on behalf of Malema when she previously sued the ANC Youth League under his helm.
He recalled that she offered him soup during that meeting, and labelled her as “tough” and “firm” – someone who “engages, sometimes to a point of irritation”.
Fast-forward to the immediate post-election period, Mbalula said that when the party realised it wasn’t going to achieve an outright majority, he instructed party officials to send “feelers” to the DA.
Mbalula added:
We and the DA are like water and oil. We had to sit down [and] think about South Africa and the interests of our people first. In real terms, we’ve got a country that could [have] been just reduced to ashes.
Mbalula added that the ANC realised the outcome wasn’t favourable for its “democratic forces”.
“The first strategic question you asked yourself: ‘How do we safeguard power?’ At the time, people expected leadership and not slogans, rhetoric and saying things that aren’t real,” Mbalula said.
Potgieter added that parties were aware that the country was on a knife’s edge and the leaders understood they needed to move faster in the negotiations.
She said the DA wanted to have an exclusive coalition agreement with the ANC and IFP, but the ANC told the DA that wasn’t going to help the party move forward.
