It is so wonderful to have Tony Leon signed up as a columnist on The Common Sense team. His first column appeared yesterday, and he was excellent on YouTube with Gabriel Makin, where he gave good advice to the DA: honour the voters, do nothing that hurts the party in 2029.

Leon says he has told Geordin Hill-Lewis that “the summit is now in reach”. What a thought. Twenty years ago, the ANC got 64% in the local government election and the DA 16%. Now the gap is just over five points.

The ANC still, seemingly, does not understand why that happened. Some of the theories doing the rounds are plain silly. The GNU caused the ANC to do so badly; the ANC was not radical enough; and if the MKP and the EFF had stayed, the party would still be over 50%. All of that is false. But the ANC is welcome to believe it, and the longer it continues to do so, the narrower that little gap will become.

What explains the halving of ANC support is what the ANC did to the economy after 2008. Populist policies around mining, expropriation, national health insurance, and ever more onerous BEE crushed investor confidence. Consequently,fixed investment fell, and therefore growth declined, causing job creation to stall. Having created roughly eight million net new jobs between 1994 and 2008, post-2008 just over two million have been created as the unemployment rate rocketed to over five times the global average. The fortunes of the ANC and of the economy are so intertwined that they cannot be undone.

Now the balance of populist opinion in the ANC wants to fix that by doing a deal with ActionSA, the MKP, and the EFF. Roll on the summit.

For people who have tried to help the ANC understand all this over the years, the loss, and the party’s response to the loss, are surreal things to watch. The ANC confidently hounded good advice out of its ranks. It was like speaking to the deaf. Now it is shocked at the consequences. Unlike the usual five stages of grief (denial, depression, bargaining, anger, and acceptance), the ANC seems to have only two, denial and shock, and switches between these in a binary manner. Denial, shock, denial, shock, denial, shock.

Who now sails that ship? This is also unclear. Mr Ramaphosa made a very odd speech on Sunday evening, saying South Africans had voted for jobs and clean water and that this was very good. Read the text, and the speech could have been made by opposition leaders. Wandering albatrosses say he just does not care. Another says he’s busy this week planning a trip to America to inspect tech businesses as part of South Africa’s drive to become a competitive tech economy.

Herman Mashaba is ever more the mad, screaming, petulant child this column last week quoted him as being described by Gareth van Onselen. He has offered the DA Johannesburg if it fires Helen Zille. His party only came third in the city; he has nothing to offer. It is all absurd. No party will be dictated to in terms of whom it may employ or not, let alone a figure of the gravitas of Zille. So what is his game? The best explanation is to sink the prospects of a DA/ANC deal so that Gauteng can be delivered to its current rogue ActionSA/ANC/EFF/MKP alliance again.

What should be done? The best thing is that the DA and ANC make a pact. The reasons are several. First, that is what voters want, and between seven and eight out of every ten ANC and DA voters would support this. Second, the pact would cover about 75% of South Africa’s municipalities and 80% of its population, and would therefore be stabilising. Third, it would extend the current DA/ANC deal at a national level down to the local level, allowing better alignment of government priorities across all tiers of government. Fourth, it would amount to a deal between the middle classes in suburbia and the aspirant middle classes on the urban fringes (and the rural poor whose hopes for a better South Africa now find their expression in their children and grandchildren who have moved to the urban fringes). Fifth, given that the DA draws its voters from the middle classes and the ANC from the urban fringes and rural areas, the two parties would not be fishing in the same pond, making for a stable coalition (coalitions work best between parties with very different voter bases). Sixth, the interests of the middle classes and the aspirant middle classes are the same, which means the two parties could agree, in theory, on a common policy pact, one that could lift the growth rate (although to date in the GNU the ANC has worked hard to sabotage all of that, which is a function of its failure to understand the intertwined nature of its and the economy’s success). No other coalition formation provides all these advantages. It is the perfect deal, except that the ANC is rudderless, leaderless, and does not understand why it has lost, and to whom.

What happens if the ANC and mad Herman go in with the EFF and the MKP, expanding the Gauteng coalition nationally? Growth stays down, financial markets reprice South Africa. Reform goes nowhere. The ANC closes the door on a good leader post-Mr Ramaphosa. And that is lights out for the ANC. Its support, which slipped into the 40s in 2024 and now the 30s, will slip into the 20s and then maybe the teens as it is torn apart by its ideological kin in their fetid, shrinking little pond.

What happens next for the country? The middle classes should be fine in their enclaves. There will be an election in 2029 and again in 2031. The DA should do very well in both. Maybe some ANC fragment has come to its senses, and they can form a government. Maybe the DA governs the whole country. Maybe new parties have come on to the scene. Perhaps South Africa fragments into a de-facto federation faster than anyone has seen coming. Maybe things fall apart.

Such a lot can happen in the next year. The story to have in mind as you think about that is perhaps that told by our great friend Hermann Giliomee of what John Vorster told Ian Smith towards the end of the Rhodesian conflict. It is cited below, fully in Giliomee’s original words, as he wrote it up so well (the context is that Vorster has told Smith to accept a deal to end the war).

“And so Mr Vorster, in trying to persuade Mr Smith, told him the fable of the Sultan’s horse: A sultan had sentenced two men to death. Just as they were being dragged away, he remarked, he will commute the sentence of the man that could make his horse talk. The next day one of the men was being dragged to the executioner to be beheaded. He saw the other man standing there free! He frantically shouted: ‘What did you tell the Sultan? I said it was impossible to make a horse talk!’ ‘No,’ said the other man, ‘I said to the Sultan I can teach a horse to talk. But I need a year. And he then let me go. You know,’ the free man continued with a glint in his eye, ‘a lot can happen in a year – the damn horse can die or the Sultan can die.’

A variation of that story, and one apt to the generally glass half full outlook of this newspaper, is to add, “…and who knows, maybe we will even get the horse to talk”.