As the spectre of electoral humiliation looms for Africa’s oldest liberation party, so does the prospect of a frightening MK Party-EFF coalition
January 15, 2026 at 05:00 amShare current article via EmailShare current article via FacebookShare current article via TwitterShare current article via LinkedIn
By Justice Malala – Financial Mail
They called the fight “The Last Hurrah”.
It was October 1980. Muhammad Ali, once the self-declared most beautiful and most articulate man on the planet, was at the age of 38 challenging his former sparring partner Larry Holmes, 30, for the World Boxing Council heavyweight title.
I saw a picture from that fight in a magazine a few months afterwards. I remember that even as a young boy it broke my heart. In the photo Ali is slumped on his stool in his corner, just seconds after his trainer, Angelo Dundee, threw in the towel in the 10th round. The man known across the globe as “The Greatest” had been savagely punished by Holmes for every minute of those 10 rounds. Nothing shouted “defeat” or “humiliation” quite like that picture.
“Ali was a Ferrari without an engine, a Rolex with the works missing. There was nothing inside,” wrote Pat Putnam in Sports Illustrated magazine. It was over. The era of “the greatest” had come to an end.
That image of Ali came back to me last Saturday as I watched the ANC go through the motions of celebrating its 114th birthday in North West province. The small Moruleng stadium (capacity: 20,000) outside Rustenburg stood largely empty. Speakers strained their vocal cords trying to enthuse the bored, bused-in people in the audience. As the day wore on, the empty stands told the ANC leaders what they knew already: defeat in the local government elections at the end of this year is guaranteed.
Looming defeat is not the biggest of the ANC’s problems, though.
The real crisis is that the party that can boast about being the first liberation movement on the continent, and the first organisation in Africa to fashion, animate and present the ideology of nonracialism, has run out of ideas. All it has now are empty slogans.
The party spokesperson, Mahlengi Bhengu, kicked off the slogans on Saturday morning by telling a reporter: “We need to educate our leaders.” Staunch ANC ally Cosatu leader Zingiswa Losi followed up with this banger: “We need cadres, not careerists.”
You don’t say. Then came ANC first deputy secretary-general Nomvula Mokonyane, who shouted into the camera: “Jobs for our people!”
Mokonyane said this as if her party had been in the opposition benches instead of in power for 31 years. It was difficult not to sympathise with a pensioner who told the SABC that his local councillor in Mahikeng (a town that was pristine in the 1980s but now looks like a slum) “is doing fokol”. The pensioner had not had water for two months. He said roads were riddled with potholes and the ANC councillor never calls public meetings. It was a familiar story among those attending.
It was not always like this. Over the past 40 years journalists and political commentators closely followed the ANC’s January 8 statements to get a pointer to where policy and, crucially, government implementation, was headed. This year the ANC had nothing to offer. After 31 years in power, the ANC did not tell us about policy innovation or readiness for the future. In a complex and fast-changing era, the ANC seemed like a party that did not know the world had altered fundamentally in the past 30 years.
This leads us to one obvious conclusion: the ANC is not just incapable of leading much of South Africa, but reception to it across communities indicates that it has nothing under its hat and will continue to act as it has done and thus lose support. Like a defeated Muhammad Ali slumped in his corner, it has run out of juice. It’s done. And everyone knows this.
We are about 10 months from the local elections. The ANC will be clobbered. It won’t form governments. It will be a bit player. It will suffer further declines in national and provincial elections in 2029.
Nightmare coalition
The question, then, is who is going to lead the various coalitions that will emerge in the wake of the ANC’s collapse and what kind of South Africa will they seek to build? Will we be saddled with the prospect of the frightening MK Party-EFF coalition that is forming in KwaZulu-Natal right now?
This is the urgent consideration of the year ahead: who will step in where the ANC has failed and where it is about to be booted out?
Martin Plaut 