Can the DA Use the “Cape Town Model” for the Rest of SA?

As we approach the local elections, the national political scene is unusually fluid. All the indications are that the decline of the African National Congress (ANC) has continued and that despite its prolonged leadership paralysis the Democratic Alliance (DA) is polling more strongly than ever.

This is a new phenomenon: in 2024 the DA had actually lost 117 000 votes from its 2019 total – and the 2019 result had been so bad that it cost Mmusi Maimane the party leadership.

Indeed, the DA vote share peaked in 2014 and the subsequent decade of Maimane and current party leader John Steenhuisen has been one of consistent decline. In 2024, this was partially masked by the ANC’s even steeper decline, but the basic fact is that between 2014 and 2024 the DA lost more than half a million votes.

To some extent this was because of declining national turnout, though the DA has generally enjoyed higher turnout rates than other parties and might have hoped to buck the trend. Instead, the party has suffered from the almost inevitable attrition of mushrooming tiny parties on its flanks, as South Africa’s extreme form of proportional representation encourages small contenders who would have no hope under most electoral systems.

Presumably the DA will resolve its leadership crisis reasonably soon. There is no doubt that the current situation is highly damaging to the party. In Parliament it has been silent on a number of key matters. Morale within the party’s electorate has been badly affected. Some party donors have withdrawn their funding until there is a leadership change. Moreover, the failure of Steenhuisen, who serves as Agriculture Minister, to come to grips with the foot-and-mouth disease crisis throughout his first eighteen months in office means that he is now going to be responsible for dealing with a major national crisis.

The farmers – a key DA constituency – are up in arms against the minister. The real question is not what levels the party is currently polling at but what levels it might achieve under a renewed and popular leadership.

Strong position

For there is no doubt that the DA’s strategic position has never been stronger. The ANC is visibly wilting. It has nothing new to offer and its leaders enunciate the same tired old policies that have already failed badly. The ruination of cities and towns run by the ANC is there for all to see. None of the contenders for the future ANC leadership have any serious national appeal. The national government is weak and failing and is publicly disrespected even by the military.

President Cyril Ramaphosa seems to have lost all enthusiasm for his job and is only going through the motions. In soccer terms what the ANC is presenting to the opposition is an open goal.

However, the obvious question is, if the ANC is still losing ground and the DA is paralysed, then who stands to gain? The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) shows no sign of expanding and Julius Malema may shortly be facing a jail sentence of up to 15 years for gun law infractions. Even a five-year term would severely disorganise the EFF and rob it of its main dynamic element.

The uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) is belatedly trying to muster its forces for a takeover of government in KwaZulu-Natal but the situation there remains inchoate. The MKP claims, of course, that it will dramatically improve service delivery there but that seems highly unlikely. The party is full of unsavoury characters who would see control of the provincial government as a major revenue-inducing opportunity.

And how would an MKP provincial government work? All decisions would be taken in Nkandla by an 83-year-old man who was never an effective provincial minister in his day. Meanwhile there is no reason to believe that the party will expand beyond its present Zulu electorate.

Lower voter turnout

So, the answer may be simply that the long trend to ever-lower electoral turnout will continue as more and more voters give up on the choices with which they are presented. However, there is an emerging possibility, which I would offer for consideration. It is based on what I would call the Cape Town model.

The DA won power in Cape Town in 2006 after four years of disastrous ANC municipal government in which the city was brought near to collapse through the neglect of infrastructural maintenance. Meanwhile the city was rocked by a series of corruption scandals. In 2006 the DA won 42.3% of the vote and gained power only through a series of shaky coalition deals. But Mayor Helen Zille’s success in turning things around saw the DA winning power in the whole Western Cape in 2009 and then a large majority in Cape Town in the 2011 municipal elections, allowing it to govern without the need for coalition partners. This pattern has continued to the present day. The DA has now ruled Cape Town for twenty years and the situation seems unlikely to change.

It is impressive that, although the DA vote fell precipitously in 2021 due to voter apathy and the inroads made by splinter parties, it easily retained its overall majority – suggesting that its dominance can endure through all seasons.

This period has seen headlong demographic change. In 2006 Cape Town was a city of approximately three million people, of whom 32% were black, 48% were Coloureds and 20% were white or Asian. We lack exact figures but in 2026 the city has five million residents and the majority are black. The Coloured proportion has shrunk to around 30% and the white/Asian category to around 15%.

This has been a period of increasing “semigration” as large numbers of homeowners from Gauteng and elsewhere in South Africa have migrated to the Cape, attracted by its relative prosperity and its better governance. This has brought a large infusion of capital with it and there is much new building. One result is that the city has by far the lowest rate of unemployment in the country – under 20% compared to the national rate of 31.9% (in the third quarter of 2025) or, on the expanded definition, including discouraged workers, of 44.9%.

However, this influx of (mainly) white, Asian, and Coloured homeowners has been dwarfed by the continuing influx of much poorer blacks both from the Eastern Cape and from much further afield – Cape Town now has substantial Zimbabwean and Congolese communities, for example. Again, one only has approximate figures though we know that between 2011 and 2025 1.1 million people left the Eastern Cape for the Western Cape. (Another 500 000 left the Eastern Cape for Gauteng.)

Helen Zille’s depiction of these migrants as “refugees” caused a storm but there is no doubt that they are fleeing from mass unemployment and from poor schools, hospitals, roads, and other services. The Eastern Cape is the ANC’s “home province” and, hardly accidentally, is also the worst governed. The result is a steady increase in Cape Town’s African population, popularly estimated at not less than 50 000 people a year.

Infrastructure spending

The bulk of these new arrivals end up living in the vast informal housing area of Khayelitsha. It is a staple of ANC propaganda that the DA spends money mainly on the privileged formerly white suburbs and neglects the black areas. The truth is exactly the opposite. The DA council has by far the heaviest infrastructure spending of any city in South Africa and 75% of it is directed towards lower-income communities. The result has been the upgrading of roads and the improvement of services in Khayelitsha far beyond the levels seen in black townships or squatter camps under ANC control.

The result is that between 2006 and 2026 at least a million new African residents arrived in Cape Town, the large majority of whom settled in Khayelitsha. Given the degree of racial voting patterns in South Africa in that period one would have expected that to produce a burgeoning ANC vote. Yet in the period 2006-2021 the ANC municipal vote fell from 38.67% to 18.48% – that is, it more than halved.

Had the new residents of Khayelitsha turned out in force for the ANC at the polls the DA’s municipal dominance would have been seriously threatened and perhaps overthrown. Instead, the ANC threat has dwindled, and the DA’s hegemony seems fairly fixed despite the fact that its mayors have all belonged to the white and Coloured minorities.

Within Khayelitsha there is a small but growing fringe of support for the DA but the political fundamental there is massive abstention. From the DA’s viewpoint this is a benign abstention, allowing it to keep power, as the effect of mass African abstention is to make the ANC far too weak to be much of a challenger to the DA – and it also magnifies the significance of the DA vote, which usually benefits from much higher turnout levels.

It is difficult to interpret this African abstention as other than a grudging acceptance of DA rule. While most African voters still find it difficult to envisage voting for the DA in practice, they appear to understand that the situation is certainly far better than in the ANC-ruled provinces and cities from which they have migrated. The city itself is relatively well managed without the high levels of corruption seen in ANC municipalities. Unemployment is far lower than in any other part of South Africa; the public schools and hospitals are better run than elsewhere; and the city spends heavily on trying to improve living standards in Khayelitsha. In effect, the DA bargain is that it levies quite a heavy rates burden on middle class homeowners and uses the proceeds for redistribution to poorer areas.

In ANC-run cities, that money is normally stolen, or anyway misappropriated, and the black poor are the losers. But in Cape Town, considerable amounts of that money – billions of rands – goes into maintaining and improving infrastructure in black areas.

At every election the ANC announces that it is sending a “high-power team” to turn round the ANC’s fortunes in the Cape. And each time the ANC vote falls again. Everything suggests that African voters in Cape Town stopped listening to the ANC some years ago. That is to say, they reached a state of disillusionment with the ANC that the rest of the African electorate is arriving at only now.

This then is the “Cape Town model”: relatively good governance, mass African abstention and large-scale redistribution towards the black and Coloured poor. This model has many deficiencies, but in contemporary high-unemployment South Africa it is as good as it gets for the black poor. Politically it has had the effect of allowing the continued leadership of an enlightened liberal elite despite a demographic balance heavily tilted against it.

Normalised

As this situation has normalised the effect has been to de-emphasise the racial cleavages that have dominated South African politics. In effect African voters in Cape Town have allowed pragmatic and practical considerations to become increasingly important rather than ideology or previous political loyalties. The fact that the DA is now running Helen Zille for the mayoralty of Johannesburg should be seen as an attempt to generalise this Cape Town model further afield. Early polling from Jo’burg suggests this is meeting with some success as voters there, too, prioritise practical issues above ideology or previous political preferences.

The larger systemic effect of this trend is that, together with the national decline of the ANC, it has thus allowed the re-entry of a liberal elite into the country’s governance. Typically this elite is drawn from the most educated section of the population and it is strongly supported by the majority of the white, Asian and Coloured minorities as well as by a minority of black voters. For more than thirty years, this elite has been ruthlessly excluded from power, and the country has paid a high price for thus excluding its most educated element. The only whites, Asians, and Coloureds playing leading roles in government were generally Communists who, by definition, were mere ideologues who represented virtually no one in their communities.

We are only part-way into this transition. By the end of the year, it seems likely that the ANC will lose power in several metros, causing a further major shrinkage of its patronage base. The likelihood is that the DA – the political vehicle of the liberal elite – will strengthen its position in a large number of cases.

Taken together with the likely continuation of the Government of National Unity the result may well be a further large gain in influence and position for the liberal elite. That elite’s recovery from the depths of its defeat in 1994, when the DA’s predecessor, the Democratic Party, won only 1.7% of the vote, has been quite remarkable. This counter-trend is rapidly negating the narrative of the great African nationalist surge of the previous generation, a tide that is now ebbing remorselessly.