Zille at 39% for Jozi, ANC voters want Motsepe

Helen Zille is everywhere. Yesterday, I bumped into her at the Linden market at Emmarentia Dam, which was heaving with so many potential voters that I was worried her bodyguards would get trampled in the rush for mini-doughnuts.

Can she keep it up though? The local government elections, which she is hoping will usher her into the role of mayor of Joburg, will be held, at the earliest, eight months from now.

The good news for Zille is that she’s the odds-on favourite. Research by the Social Research Foundation (SRF) and The Common Sense, conducted with 503 telephone respondents and released this weekend, put her party’s share of the vote in Joburg at 39%. That’s a 13-percentage-point rise since the 2021 election, while every other party has slipped.

The ANC has fallen four percentage points to 30%, ActionSA has 10%, while the MK Party is 8%.

The bad news for Zille is that unless she can seriously stretch her position, she won’t win outright. “It’s not implausible [that Zille could still win a majority] however, should it not be, then almost any set of coalition arrangements become possible for the city,” The Common Sense said.

Patrice for president

Perhaps a more intriguing part of the SRF’s polling is whom ANC voters would prefer to lead the party, now that Cyril Ramaphosa is serving his final term.

By a country mile, it is Patrice Motsepe, ahead of Fikile Mbalula and the incumbent deputy president, Paul Mashatile.

Earlier this month, the SRF’s research revealed that Motsepe had the highest favourability rating of the three, with 33.1%, compared to Mbalula’s 22% and Mashatile’s 11.4%.

The newest poll asked whom ANC voters specifically would prefer as the leader. Here, Motsepe was on 47%, way ahead of Mbalula (19%) and Mashatile (16%). As the SRF’s Frans Cronje put it earlier this month: “Should his camp put a serious campaign behind those numbers, no other ANC candidate could possibly hope to catch him.”

Now, these results are surprising for many reasons.

First, Motsepe isn’t in any of the ANC’s leadership structures. Even Ramaphosa had to bide his time, having served as ANC deputy president to Jacob Zuma from 2012.

Second, the chasm between expectations and reality sets the stage for an almighty, potentially existential, bunfight in the ANC. Of South Africa’s democratic presidents, all served as the country’s deputy president at some point, and when Thabo Mbeki had tried to squeeze out the noxious Zuma, who was then facing corruption charges, it was Mbeki who ultimately lost that fight and exited the stage.

The point is, it’s immensely hard to derail the passage of incumbency in the ANC; Mashatile, riddled with scandal as he is, expects to assume the top position. A challenge from outside the party would be a huge deal, not least because it would undermine the party’s carefully crafted veneer of succession planning.

Of course, Motsepe himself has said he is not really in the running. Speaking at the AGM of his company, African Rainbow Minerals, last month, Motsepe said these rumours that he is campaigning are “false”, and that a campaign website named PM27 had nothing to do with him.

 Well, the cynics might say, that’s what he would say. But if the ANC keeps shedding support at this pace, it would be hard pressed to ignore Motsepe if it wants to retain any vestige of power – no matter the Pandora’s Box it might open.

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_{Top image: Helen Zille. Picture: Gallo Images/Sharon Seretlo.}