The DA’s Kempton Park moment with a shock eight-vote win in Evaton

Just over a century ago, on 17 June 1924, the National Party won its first general election in South Africa. Deprived of an outright parliamentary majority, it formed a “pact government” with the Labour Party, both parties committed to advancing white interests above all.

The reason why outgoing prime minister, Jan Smuts, called the snap poll that led to his ousting was the shock loss, two months before, by his South African Party (SAP) of a “safe seat” in a by-election in Wakkerstroom, in the Eastern Transvaal (Mpumalanga today).

In the century since then, by-elections in both the apartheid and democratic eras played an outsize role in signalling a change in the political weather and indicating climate change to come. Sometimes, though, they heralded a false dawn of premature or the failed promise of future electoral success.

This phenomenon is not confined to South Africa: In Britain, this month’s by-election in Makerfield, Manchester, could, if Labour’s Andy Burnham wins, spell the end of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership.

In the category of false dawns here and decades after the Wakkerstroom shock came the Potchefstroom by-election in the end days of white rule in February 1992. This seat was also in the historic heartland of Afrikanerdom and had hitherto been one of the safest National Party constituencies in the country.

There, in a surprise win, the far-right Conservative Party won the seat from FW de Klerk’s ruling NP, suggesting briefly that its 44-year grip of white power was at an end.

De Klerk, though, pivoted that unexpected defeat to rally his voters by calling a national white referendum just one month later. On 17 March 1992, he secured a 69% ‘yes’ vote to continue negotiations for a democratic South Africa.

His tactical triumph rendered the advances of the Conservative Party in that by-election irrelevant. And the power dynamic switched from the Parliament De Klerk controlled to the Codesa negotiations at Kempton Park, which he did not.

Kempton Park on the East Rand, in turn, would play a significant role in shaping the contours of politi

cs today in South Africa.

During the negotiations there (1991 to 1993), De Klerk’s sure-footed tactical smarts, illustrated for example by how he converted his loss in Potchefstroom into a stunning referendum victory, were no match for the strategic defeat he suffered at the hands of the ANC negotiators.

The new Constitution, aside from some fig-leaf concessions to NP concerns, was designed far more in the image of the ANC that went on to win a thumping victory in April 1994.

Yet in February 1997, less than three years after that historic general election, where the NP, though ousted from power, won 82 seats in Parliament, it was humiliated in a municipal by-election in the same Kempton Park area.

Democratic Party (DP) candidate Mike Waters won the seat by a huge majority, obtaining 76% of the vote. In the same seat in 1995, the DP had obtained just 13% of the total. Since the DP, which I led at the time, had only seven seats in Parliament, many commentators thought Kempton Park more of a flash in the pan or an electoral warning that the NP needed to up its game to quell its voters’ discontent. Damaging, in other words, but not a rout.

The remarkable, and at the time under-remarked, feature of that by-election was the makeup of the area: overwhelmingly Afrikaans and working-class, far removed from the fusty upper-class English-speaking suburbs that traditionally supported the DP.

Kempton Park proved to be no single swallow but heralded a long DP summer. Over the next months, the DP that went on to beat the NP in its traditional heartlands in a slew of by-elections that followed. Losing a string of contests from Witbank to Brakpan and Rosettenville and Bergvliet, the NP experienced the deepest winter of voter discontent, culminating in its humiliation in the 1999 general election and its complete disappearance after the 2004 poll (into the untender embrace of the ANC into which it folded itself).

Writing later of these seismic tremors under the electoral landscape, Professor Susan Booysen, a political analyst, observed, “It was a set of 1997/98 local by-election results that first signalled the NP’s pending disintegration.”

Of course, those dramatic breakthroughs 30 years back were a rearrangement of the political furniture on the opposition or minority side of the room. It did little to disturb the ANC’s occupation of the seats of power. It was only the surge of the ANC breakaway MKP, led by a vengeful Jacob Zuma, that saw the ANC lose its parliamentary majority for the first time in 2024.

But did something profound shift last week in another municipal by-election, this time in Evaton in the far south of Gauteng, around 80 km away from Kempton Park?

I recall bumping into former opposition leader Frederik van Zyl Slabbert after the by-election triumph in 1997, and he peevishly observed that he would be far more impressed had the DP won a seat in a black township rather than in a white Afrikaans ward.

That is the achievement the DA (successor party to the DP) notched up last week. Indeed, one DA leader, soaked in the party history, said to me on Friday: “This is our Kempton Park moment.”

There are, of course, a lot of caveats attached to DA’s win in Evaton that distinguish it from the 1997 by-election: it won last week by just eight votes ahead of the ANC. The SA Communist Party’s 3% drew likely votes from the ANC. Even in a sea of dysfunctional municipalities ruined by ANC rule, Evaton falls within one of the worst local governments, Emfuleni, a ground zero of uncollected garbage, collapsed electricity, and limited water and little sanitation.

Yet Evaton breaks new ground for the DA since the ward is 98% black African. It is the get-out-of-jail card for the party, whether the victory there is a single swallow or a harbinger of a new electoral summer. In one win, it rebuts the incubus of “white party”, “apartheid throwback”, and other slurs the ANC has cast on the DA since its formation in 2000. And it is not that Evaton voters had no other choices to protest-vote against the ANC: the ballot featured all manner of so-called black parties, from the SACP to the PAC and EFF. Yet it was only the DA that doubled its voter percentage and snatched the seat.

How the DA rides this victory to future success is yet to be determined. It is also too early to see whether the ANC possesses the means or the will for its oft-proclaimed renewal, more often a mirage than a reality.

Though one sign that the ANC has woken to its pending demise is the almost immediate recall of its hopeless mayor of the Emfuleni municipality just 24 hours after its shock loss in Evaton.

The party cited as a reason for the unusual decision was that Mayor Sipho Radebe had presided over “governance failures, poor service delivery and a financially distressed municipality”.

But hang on a sec: He has been overseeing the municipality since 2021, and for five years the ANC kept him in post. And would not their reason for his recall fit hundreds of other municipal administrations, large and small, governed by the ANC?

It was the eight-vote loss that forced the party’s hand. Never doubt the power of the vote to force change. Just as our history illustrates over the course of nearly a century.