Rabbie Serumula, author, award-winning poet, journalist.
Image: File
Coalition politics is no longer a warning on the horizon, it is the weather we are living in. And in Gauteng, the forecast has forced the African National Congress into unlikely company.
The inclusion of the Economic Freedom Fighters into Panyaza Lesufi’s provincial executive, with Nkululeko Dunga taking the finance portfolio, is more arithmetic than ideological alignment. It is the politics of a party that can no longer govern alone, but refuses to surrender control.
Not long ago, Fikile Mbalula warned that bringing the EFF into the national fold would be dangerous, even fatal to the ANC. He was not wrong. At a national level, such a move would shake markets, fracture alliances, and redraw the country’s economic direction. But provinces are not nations. Gauteng is not the Union Buildings. Here, survival is counted in votes, not visions.
And so the ANC does what wounded giants do; it adapts.
But the story does not end with the EFF. Looming in the wings is the Umkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), a force still defining itself, yet already shaping the balance of power. Should MKP enter the Gauteng executive, the province could become a three-legged coalition: uneasy, unpredictable, but numerically secure.
Such an arrangement would not be built on trust. It would be built on mutual dependence. The ANC would anchor it, the EFF would influence it, and the MKP would introduce a certain volatility, not necessarily breaking the coalition, but keeping it in a constant state of negotiation.
This is where the future begins to take shape. If this coalition holds, even imperfectly, it may offer a blueprint of possibility for the 2026 local government elections. Former political rivals may find themselves sharing power, trading principles for proximity to the state. Municipalities could mirror Gauteng: fragmented councils governed by necessity rather than coherence.
For the EFF, this is a test of transformation from protest to policy, from disruption to delivery. For MKP, it is an opportunity to convert momentum into machinery. And for the ANC, it is a reckoning: to govern as one player among many.
Of course, there is another possibility, that this experiment collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. That competing egos, incompatible policies, and mutual suspicion fracture the arrangement. That scenario could drive 2026 voters away from coalition politics, resulting in a backlash against the ANC and all other partners implicated in the dysfunction
This is why Solly Msimanga calls it desperation. And perhaps it is. But desperation, in politics, is often just another word for adaptation under pressure.
The truth is simpler, and more unsettling. South Africa is no longer governed by certainty. It is governed by negotiation. And in Gauteng, we are watching the first draft of that future being written in careful, calculated compromise.