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South Africa is currently governed by two competing coalition models.

The first is the national Government of National Unity (GNU), the arrangement between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Democratic Alliance (DA) formed after the 2024 election. Whatever its shortcomings, it is a reform-tolerant government. It has held the fiscal line, and its survival depends on whether it can demonstrate that ANC-DA cooperation can arrest the country's decline.

The second is the rogue GNU. Centred around Gauteng and specifically around Johannesburg and Tshwane, it is an alternative pact that has rejected the ANC-DA alliance in favour of alternatives built around the ANC, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), and ActionSA. 

The two models are in conflict with each other.

Ahead of the GNU being created in 2024, the DA was already governing Tshwane with a coalition of smaller parties, including ActionSA, and did not require the numbers of the ANC to form a governing coalition. This was one of the reasons why the city never replicated the ANC-DA alliance. But shortly after the 2024 elections, ActionSA, which had not joined the national GNU and was increasingly in conflict with the DA and critical of the national GNU, decided to undo the Tshwane governing arrangement by striking a counter-GNU deal with the ANC and EFF that brought about the demise of the mayorship of Cilliers Brink. The municipal manager of Tshwane, however, remained the very impressive Johan Mettler, who had been appointed when the DA still headed the coalition that ran the city in 2022.

That left the rogue GNU with a problem, in that the political leadership of the city had shifted, but the municipal manager had not. Over the ensuing period, an effort was made to change that and it is this change that has now been affected. But before getting to how that was done, it is necessary to say a few things about Mettler himself.

Mettler is one of South Africa's most experienced municipal turnaround specialists. His record spans more than 25 years and four major interventions in failing administrations.

He is a lawyer and professional administrator who helped build South Africa's modern local government system before spending his career repairing municipalities broken by mismanagement. During the 1990s he worked as a researcher at the University of the Western Cape's Community Law Centre, focusing on constitutional government and municipal powers. From 1998 to 2003 he worked at the South African Local Government Association, where he helped develop local government legislation and trained councillors and officials across the country.

In 2010 he was appointed administrator of Msunduzi Municipality, which includes Pietermaritzburg, then under provincial administration after financial and administrative collapse. Basic services were restored, officials implicated in corruption were suspended, and the municipality recorded a R58 million surplus in the first quarter of 2010/11 after a R522 million deficit the previous full year.

As municipal manager of Drakenstein (Paarl) in the Western Cape from 2012, he led the administration to its first clean audit, for the 2013/14 financial year. The result was achieved using the municipality's own employees, without consultants hired to prepare the books.

In late 2015, national government seconded him to Nelson Mandela Bay, where he was permanently appointed city manager in 2016 and worked alongside Athol Trollip's DA-led administration. After Mettler's appointment, revenue collection rose and water losses fell. Weekly waste collection was expanded, a fraud hotline became operational, and a metro police service was launched.

Mettler took office as Tshwane city manager on 1 September 2022, after a prolonged period in which the city had lacked a permanently appointed city manager. He inherited severe financial problems, weak controls, deteriorating infrastructure, and poor audit outcomes.

Under Mettler, Tshwane's audit outcomes improved dramatically.

The table below shows that from 28 qualifications in its financial statements in 2021/22, the number was brought down to just two in 2024/25. A qualification is a finding that an auditor would make about a problem in an entity’s financial statements.

In addition to the improved audit outcomes, his administration introduced stronger tracking of council decisions through senior managers' performance agreements, restored the Financial Disciplinary Board, made 78 criminal referrals to law enforcement agencies, and reduced procurement irregularities. The progress Mettler made caused great discomfort for the city’s new ruling coalition, given that the room for corruption was being significantly limited.

All the while the political ground was shifting beneath Mettler’s feet. DA mayor Cilliers Brink was removed through a motion of no confidence in September of 2024, and ActionSA's Nasiphi Moya became executive mayor in October at the head of a coalition with the ANC and EFF.

In June 2026, that coalition made its boldest move yet against him. The push came from the EFF, whose Tshwane leader Obakeng Ramabodu tabled a 45-page complaint accusing Mettler of maladministration, irregular recruitment, and obstruction. On 27 June Mettler was given seven days to explain why he should not be suspended.

He denied the allegations and, through the trade union Solidarity, submitted a 40-page response arguing the process was unlawful and the outcome predetermined. On 9 July, after a closed-door special council meeting that ran more than eight hours, council voted to place him on precautionary suspension on full pay pending an independent investigation.

That vote is disputed with the DA alleging irregularities and saying it will challenge the matter in court.

The whole saga is a useful prism into the battle that is raging between South Africa’s two GNUs. Local government elections are approaching, and the rogue GNU's grip on Gauteng's metros is its principal asset in the argument it is making to the national ANC: that an ANC-EFF-MKP arrangement is a viable alternative to the GNU deal with the DA.