Chapter One
Getting to grips with our coalition future
A powerful exception
The ANC has governed South Africa for more than two decades – a long time for any one party to be in power on its own in a multiparty democracy. In fact, only three of the world’s 79 democracies – Botswana, Malaysia and Namibia1 – currently have a governing party that governed on its own for longer than the ANC.
The ANC’s dominance is reflected in the national election results. In South Africa’s first democratic election on 27 April 1994, the ANC, then led by Nelson Mandela, won 62.65 per cent of the vote.2 This increased to 66.35 per cent in 1999, when Thabo Mbeki became president, followed by 69.69 per cent, at the start of Mbeki’s second term, in 2004. This meant that, from 2004 to 2009, the ANC controlled more than two thirds of the seats in the National Assembly, giving the party enough power to change the Constitution on its own. This is likely to go down in history as the high-water mark of single-party hegemony. ANC support slightly declined to 65.90 per cent in 2009, with Zuma poised to become president, followed by a further drop to 62.15 per cent in 2014.
For more than two decades, the ANC has controlled not only the national government, but also at least seven out of nine provinces, and more than 90 per cent of municipalities. Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has been a single-party regime in which it has been hard to imagine the ANC losing a national election.
But the story of single-party dominance actually started long before the ANC got into power. The ANC’s near-complete control since 1994 was preceded by 46 years of one-party rule under the whites-only National Party (NP).3 In fact, under the NP and ANC, South Africa has experienced 70 years of uninterrupted single-party governance.
As a result, South Africans are used to one party calling the shots. We expect most cabinet ministers to belong to a single dominant party, and we are used to having a Parliament in which ‘party discipline’ is enough to ensure that any legislation the ruling party wants is passed without much difficulty. Analysts and observers are also accustomed to blaming corruption and the ANC’s many governance failures on the fact that its dominance is not under threat, and there is thus little incentive for it to govern well.4 As with the once all-conquering NP, the ANC’s dominance has bred arrogance, poor governance, and contempt for South African citizens.
A fading hegemon
But current electoral trends suggest that the ANC’s remarkable run is coming to an end. A combination of endemic corruption, rising crime, a stalled economy, and the party’s staunch defence of Zuma’s patronage network has gradually eroded its support since 2009, and since 2014 this trend has rapidly accelerated.
Figure 1 outlines electoral trends in national and municipal elections from 1994 to 2016, and projects those trends into the future to the 2019 national and provincial elections and the municipal elections in 2021.5 The key takeaway is that, for the first time in 25 years, the ANC may lose its majority in the next national and provincial elections.
Source: Electoral Commission of South Africa.
While earlier efforts to imagine a post-ANC future were largely premised on wishful thinking, the data shows that the time has arrived for South Africans to start imagining what the country’s politics will be like without the dominance of a single party. As Chapter Two will show, the ANC is also in big trouble when it comes to many urban municipalities as well as at the provincial level in the Western Cape, Gauteng, and even North West and the Northern Cape provinces.
Now that it is no longer a foregone conclusion that the ANC will win all upcoming municipal, provincial and national elections, we need to ask the most important question of our time: what will rise when the ANC falls? The answer is that, based on the country’s proportional representation electoral system, the ANC will be replaced not by another single party but by a coalition of political parties. When the two lines in Figure 1 cross, national coalitions will become the default form of government in South Africa.
The purpose of this book is to explore the far-reaching implications of the imminent shift to coalition governance. It is a shift that will force different groups to co-operate and compromise. This will transform South Africa’s political landscape, and the consequences will be felt by everyone.
We should briefly mention the ANC’s long-standing collaboration with the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). Although the ANC, SACP and Cosatu refer to themselves as a ‘tripartite alliance’, until 2017, no South African had ever cast an electoral vote for the SACP or Cosatu. (In November 2017, for the first time ever, the SACP fielded its own candidates in a by-election in the northern Free State municipality of Metsimaholo – Chapter Two returns to this remarkable break with the past). Rather than being proper coalition partners of the ANC, the SACP and Cosatu have thus far merely represented different factions within the ANC. Unlike the tripartite alliance, South Africa will soon have true, democratically elected coalition governments where all coalition partners will have to answer directly to voters.
A permanent Codesa
During the multiparty negotiations at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) in the early 1990s, political leaders and ordinary South Africans alike demonstrated that they were capable of averting a race war, and fostering mutually beneficial outcomes through negotiation and compromise. The success of the Codesa negotiations in producing a democratic dispensation made such a big impression on the national psyche that, during the ensuing decades, political and civic leaders have repeatedly argued that only a ‘new Codesa’ could address South Africa’s persistent social and economic problems.
They may soon get a version of what they wished for. With coalitions set to become the default mode of government from as early as 2019, South Africans will soon be governed by a permanent Codesa in which different political parties are forced to work together.
It is no accident that coalitions will rise when ANC domination falls. During the multiparty negotiations in the early 1990s, leaders from across the political spectrum deliberately designed an electoral system that would encourage coalition governments. Even before formal negotiations over the electoral system began in 1993, there was already near-total agreement between the ANC, NP and the Democratic Party (DP) that a coalition-based electoral system – known as proportional representation – was the way to go. Let’s revisit their reasoning.
In 1993, the ANC’s constitutional specialist, Kader Asmal, declared that South Africa’s cultural, social and economic diversity required an electoral system at all levels that would ‘enable sectoral groups to be adequately represented in decision-making’.6 Given the need to ensure that as many political parties as possible would be represented in Parliament, the drafters of the Constitution chose proportional representation over the main alternative, a winner-take-all system (sometimes also called first-past-the-post).
While winner-take-all systems are arguably more stable because they usually do not require coalitions, Asmal and his associates from different parties explicitly rejected that option because of its tendency to produce governments that do not fully represent all voices in society.7 Under winner-take-all, it is easy for one party to control the national government even with less than half of the national vote. Winner-take-all is a zero-sum game: either your party’s candidate wins, or you have no voice in the legislature or executive. Given the low level of representation inherent to winner-take-all systems, both the interim and final Constitutions eventually stated that the composition of the National Assembly – the lower house of Parliament – should result ‘in general, in proportional representation’.8 With this short phrase, proportional representation became the cornerstone of South Africa’s entire political system.
This decision was based on the desire of the Constitution’s architects to create a ‘new South Africa’ in which inter-group conflict would be superseded by co-operation and compromise. As the term suggests, proportional representation is primarily concerned with ensuring