Gauteng populist Panyaza Lesufi tanks ANC, but may still get nod for premier (2024)

The ANC was given a bloody nose in Gauteng, where the party ended with 36% of the 50% it achieved in 2019 — a big factor in the party’s national decline.

The province had the most registered voters, the majority of whom stayed home in what was regarded as a protest. Soweto, for example, was an ANC stronghold that did not come out to vote in sufficient numbers. Turnout in Emfuleni, the only council with an ANC majority, was poor.

This was a significant factor in the ANC’s national vote, which saw the party lose power for the first time. With Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi heading the party’s list of candidates for premier, will the ANC again green-light his populist brand of politics?

He is known to favour a coalition with two populist parties, which would make Gauteng the first province governed by South Africa’s populist surge should he succeed.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Election Alignment: ANC-EFF coalition pact for Gauteng government is a given

Populism replaces historic ANC politics

For a party with roots deep in the churches, mission schools, academies, and later the trade unions, Lesufi’s brash populism was a shift for the ANC.

Since taking office in 2022, he seemed untouchable. The province’s discerning urban voters delivered a smackdown to the highly personalised brand of politics Lesufi created.

The image of Kliptown, with its shattered roads and forgotten people, symbolises what happened in Gauteng and how it wrote the story of Elections 2024. Kliptown is famous as the place where the Freedom Charter was agreed to and written in 1955.

Against the party’s October 2023 instruction to create distance with the EFF, Lesufi and Gauteng party bosses went ahead to boost coalition governments in Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni even as service levels to old ANC supporters went through the floor.

Since then, the city region of Gauteng has imploded under Lesufi’s watch. While he unveiled mega-glitzy projects costing billions, the province’s basics broke down.

Its roads are rutted, its street lighting needs to be fixed, and most importantly, its people are unemployed and unhappy. Crime constantly rises.

The cities of Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane (under a DA-led multiparty pact) are all run by coalitions so shaky and unstable that services have crumbled across them.

With all the provincial power available to him to intervene and set things right, Lesufi has spent the past three years courting the EFF and allowing a minority party mayor like Kabelo Gwamanda of the three-seat Al Jama-ah party to run Johannesburg, rather than keeping his eye on the ball of city services.

“The premier, through service-level agreements, has an opportunity to hold the members of the executive council for local government and finance accountable for implementing planned initiatives to improve the effectiveness of local government,” the Auditor-General said in the latest provincial and municipal report.

A premier’s job description

Gauteng is composed of a set of cities and a few smaller district councils. A premier’s job here is to deliver good education, healthcare services and transport networks. Gauteng is still the biggest contributor to SA’s GDP, and its leader’s role is to keep that pie growing to cross-subsidise the country’s system of social solidarity.

Instead, Lesufi has let things slide, and a migration stampede has made the Western Cape catch up so quickly that it is likely to eclipse Gauteng as the wealthiest province.

Gauteng (a Sesotho word that means “Place of Gold”) is now a shadow of its former self and it has been lost by the ANC. As Julius Malema said, once the ANC loses a province or city, it doesn’t get it back, as the Western Cape has shown.

Gauteng — home of a modern ANC

The loss is significant for the ANC. On election day on 29 May, three of its presidents (President Cyril Ramaphosa and two predecessors, Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe) all voted in Johannesburg, where they live.

Much of the party’s storied history is written in the province: Soweto, where Nelson and Winnie Mandela lived and the heart of the uprising in 1976 that birthed many of the movement’s finest leaders; and Chancellor House, the building where Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu had their eponymous law offices.

The ANC’s early successes were also in Gauteng. Soweto was the first and most successful post-apartheid transformation. The provincial government recast the former dormitory town of apartheid’s worst planners as a modern city linked to the metropole. It was and is still outstanding.

However, with many residents born after 1994, Soweto’s historical loyalties with the ANC frayed. A new generation wants cities that work and Lesufi failed to deliver by turning a blind eye to ailing coalition governments. Soweto is often without electricity and water.

Across the road from the Diepkloof BRT bus stop, pigs graze on litter strewn in veld that hasn’t been cleaned for months. On election day, Soweto made its unhappiness known by staying away, ANC strategists say.

Lesufi didn’t only fail to deliver city coalitions which worked for the ANC. In Emfuleni, the only council in Gauteng that the ANC still runs, the decay hits you in the face. The economy is in visceral decline in this former industrial heartland where ArcelorMittal steel dominates.

On the way in, streetlights are cut down in a line, like trees felled in a forest. Crime is out of control despite a sizeable police force and crime wardens. As dusk falls, dark comes fast. The roads are wrecked. On the way from Johannesburg to Emfuleni, expensive Gauteng Transport road infrastructure projects lie dormant and half-done.

When you read the Auditor-General’s reports, they tell the story of how the ANC lost the province. Overspending, irregular, wasteful expenditure and documented material irregularities (the worst of worst audit opinions) are common. While there are improvements in auditing, the overall quality of life in the city region is declining after years of improvements surveyed by the Gauteng City-Region Observatory.

Eventually, poor governance comes home to roost, as it did in the 2024 election.

Populism on steroids

In the campaign, Lesufi went complete strongman. He wrote an op-ed in the Sunday Times virtually instructing Ramaphosa to sign the NHI Bill into law.

Then he took the NHI on the stump, promising people they could attend private hospitals on 30 May, the day after the elections.

When Ramaphosa promulgated the NHI Act two weeks before the elections, Lesufi again claimed on social media that Gauteng hospitals were ready for the new universal health fund that same day.

In fact, the Auditor-General’s report from 2022/23 says: “We are concerned about the [Gauteng] health department’s readiness to implement government’s National Health Insurance due to inadequate infrastructure delivery, safety and security concerns, and the slow pace of repairs and maintenance.

“The department also did not perform due diligence reviews on infrastructure projects funded by the health facility revitalisation grant. Projects were poorly managed, resulting in projects being delayed, abandoned or — where completed — not being fully utilised, limiting communities’ access to healthcare facilities.”

The gap between his braggadocio and real life in Lesufi’s Gauteng got too big to bear for voters.

The premier comes to town bearing gifts

Since he took over as premier, Lesufi has been trialling a very different style of politics from his predecessor. David Makhura was more understated and like typical ANC leaders — bookish and with big plans. When Lesufi moves, it is with an entire media entourage or courtiers. A cameraperson captures his every speech, and a full social media team (more extensive than many newsrooms) boosts his profile constantly, as the graphic shows. A platoon of his own Praetorian Guard, the so-called amaPanyaza crime wardens, accompanies him.

Like all populists who fall, he began buying into his own propaganda, shielding himself from criticism from his comrades and the public with an increasingly defensive social media personality.

“Less talk. More work,” he posts in the face of genuine citizen questions about how he funded his various bling campaigns or their effectiveness.

Lesufi splurged billions in under three years on projects like Nasi iSpani, #iCrushNoLova (a R23-billion boondoggle announced with the UIF and Labour Minister Thulas Nxesi amid the election campaign), the Gauteng crime wardens, the provincial panic buttons and a smart city mirage.

These lie like monuments to a failed experiment. As the election campaign started, he diverted funds from the service organisations the city funds for its most vulnerable citizens. He started Operation Khanyisa to buy generators and micro-grids in the townships, informal settlements and hostels the ANC in Gauteng targeted to win the election. But in so doing, he lost the party support among crucial communities.

By taking money from the service organisations for the most vulnerable (the elderly, the differently abled, children and abused women), he lost black support.

By extracting resources from Johannesburg’s struggling electricity utility, City Power, to fund the ill-considered Operation Khanyisa, Lesufi exacerbated the electricity problems of the ANC’s oldest supporters in vote-rich areas like Soweto.

He shot himself and the ANC in the foot by treating black South Africans as a hom*ogenous group of “township, hostels and informal settlement” dwellers — the so-called Tish strategy. In fact, each group is very different, and they have different politics and needs. As the central plank of the Gauteng ANC election strategy, it failed and revealed how far removed its leaders are from the province’s people.

Pork barrel politics meet discerning voters

Throughout the campaign, the blur between party and state was clear. One day, Daily Maverick witnessed a senior government official swapping a government T-shirt for his ANC yellow T-shirt as Ramaphosa’s cavalcade worked through Cosmo City. The government used the Nasi iSpani public works plan as a goodie bag in a display of pork barrel politics.

Sign-ups were held at government schools and Lesufi swooped in with his entourage. He sat down by a learner as his booster media snapped and posted.

Ntombi Mlotshwa had done a bricklaying apprenticeship. Like many young people in Gauteng, she hustles and grabs opportunities and has already trained for an engineering technical fellowship. She also works at pop-ups selling fast-moving consumables like Coca-Cola or NutriDay.

Later, we asked Mlotshwa who she would vote for.

“I am going to vote, but I am really not sure who it is for. I am definitely not going to vote for the ANC. They make empty promises,” she said.

She said she had not been paid for her bricklaying work. On 23 May, Lesufi missed his deadline for making good and paying the Gauteng social organisations from which the government withheld funds.

EFF and MK make inroads into ANC votes

Across the road from a school, EFF Cosmo City chairperson Siba Mxinwa said of the ANC campaign: “They are daydreaming, those ones. Our people are coming in. They want us to take over and deliver jobs.”

The EFF and MK in Cosmo City have filled the gap left by ANC branches where members are increasingly insiders who get access to the best Gauteng government opportunities, while communities who were its traditional supporters are left out in the cold.

An EFF member explained how they help people get their children registered at schools or collect for the destitute by putting together their own money. This is how the ANC used to be in Gauteng. The EFF placed third in Gauteng with 12.46%.

The ANC’s inner-circle cadres are highly paid government managers or tenderpreneurs winning big contracts.

MK soaks up ANC voters

On Ramaphosa’s campaign day, MK set up a gazebo in Ivory Park.

With the party swag of green, black and gold everywhere, it was clear that ANC members had swapped easily because it felt like they were going “home”. MK is like a rib taken from the chest of the ANC.

While its leader, former president Jacob Zuma, has his motives for the breakaway, Daily Maverick found that on the ground, MK feels like the ANC used to.

MK member and community worker Clifford Gqiba was with a big group of members, all wearing party regalia.

“Everything has depleted. Infrastructure has collapsed. It’s not nice. Everything is a mess. There’s no privacy. In all primary schools, people are queuing for jobs [referring to the Nasi iSpane programme]. Where were those jobs [before]? They are pulling the wool [over people’s eyes],” he said.

In Soweto and Ivory Park, Daily Maverick saw MK sign-up tents run by people who had switched from the ANC. Membership book sign-ups were full, and when we flipped through them, there was no sign of gerrymandered drives. It looked like organic membership sign-ups.

“The last time they [Ivory Park] saw the President [Ramaphosa] was during elections [in 2021],” said Gauteng regional coordinator Gadaffi Olifant.

MK targeted Gauteng and worked ward by ward. The party has clever tacticians and organisers in its midst and has been a massive factor in the ANC’s fall in the province and country. In Gauteng, it placed third behind the DA and won 10.52% of votes.

ANC’s abrogation of responsibility

Gauteng has shown the folly of the ANC’s bet on its core supporters’ eternal forgiveness and kind-heartedness.

Its poor governance has caught up with it. Even in Cosmo City, a successful new urban development by the ANC, potholes mark Africa Road, the main drag into the area. People are not working and the economy is informalised, with hair salons on the pavement and hawking a major form of survivalist enterprise.

In the West Rand, governments have squandered years of taxes on the surrounding gold mines. Khutsong is beset by sinkholes. On the way in, big red and white signs warn: “High Crime Area” or “Potholes. Beware.”

When a government puts up signs like this, it symbolises the abrogation of service and responsibility.

Decay is visceral, and the many young people wandering around high on nyaope are like a dream deferred. Former ANC member Abram Matabane has flipped to the EFF, and we meet him at a rally.

“For 30 years, the ANC has done nothing. There are drugs in the location. I was a card-carrying member of the ANC.”

Anna Ngqaqu (71) also used to be an ANC member — now she was bedecked in EFF regalia. She sat with rows of other gogos in Khutsong who had come to listen to EFF leader Julius Malema speak, and who were typically ANC members.

“Our youth are not working. I was in the ANC before 2013. We owe water [tariffs] and don’t know how we will pay,” she said, going on to speak about drugs, sinkholes and various local problems.

Lesufi as an Icarus

Lesufi behaved more like the emir of a wealthy emirate, building his own police force, planning smart cities and creating pie in the sky for his people. In the end, Gauteng’s smart people voted against his brand of populism.

Many ANC campaigns have succeeded when they went to voters with a message of “We will do better” or when they owned up to their mistakes. But this time, its message of “Let’s do more, together” failed as the legendary loyalty of its voters ran aground on the evidence of state destruction and as the outsize gap between the government and the governed grew too large to sustain.

Lesufi is now set to return as premier. An ANC committee chaired by former president Kgalema Motlanthe will sit this weekend to decide on premiers.

In months of reporting, Lesufi has refused requests for an interview. The ANC in Gauteng promised to respond but did not on three occasions. The premier’s spokesperson, Sizwe Pamla, did not respond to a final request for comment this week.

Lesufi also refused requests to speak at Daily Maverick’s The Gathering and at its Gauteng premier’s debate. DM