majority in the urbanised province of Gauteng, while the Western Cape will remain out of its reach. Its winning margins in other provinces will also decline, with North West and the Northern Cape perhaps third and fourth in line to fall. (Dissatisfaction of Zuma loyalists with Ramaphosa means that even KwaZulu-Natal might soon be up for grabs.) As soon as 2019, this trend could culminate in the ANC losing its majority in a national election. With no party able to muster 50 per cent of the national vote, this will mark the final death knell of single-party domination in South Africa. However, this does not imply that the ANC will fade from the political scene. Even in South Africa’s approaching coalition future, the ANC is likely to remain the single biggest political force. But it will no longer be near-invincible.
Could another political party replace the ANC as a dominant force that controls the national government as well as most of the country’s provinces and municipalities? This points to our second assumption, namely that the end of ANC majorities will probably mean the beginning of no majorities. Despite the fact that the EFF in particular likes to talk about itself as a ‘government in waiting’10 – and despite media coverage that often portrays electoral choices as either/or scenarios – neither the EFF, DA, or any other party will become dominant once the ANC falls below 50 per cent.
Instead, we will soon have dozens of situations where, for example, a local municipality is governed by the DA in coalition with the EFF and an independent councillor, while the surrounding district municipality may be controlled by an ANC-Congress of the People (COPE) coalition. In turn, both of those municipalities might be nestled within a province run by a coalition between the DA, the United Democratic Movement (UDM) and the FF+, while a coalition comprising the ANC, the National Freedom Party (NFP) and the ACDP could be in control at the national level. To survive and thrive in our coalition future, we must urgently prepare to deal with a scale of political complexity we have never seen or experienced before.
The third assumption is the most fundamental, as it presumes that elections will remain free and fair, and that the ANC will remain willing to give up power where and when its dominant majorities disappear. As regards the fairness of elections, the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) has been widely praised for its competent administration of the electoral process.11 But a recent ruling by the Constitutional Court exposed the fact that the IEC had failed to capture the addresses of up to 16 million of the 24 million voters on the national voters’ roll. In June 2016, the court gave the IEC 18 months to make sure that all voters’ address details were correctly captured on the voters’ roll.12 For our election results to remain credible, the IEC must urgently repair the damage.
But even if our elections remain free and fair, it is still not a given that the ANC – used to being in near-total control of South African politics – would accept defeat at the polls, particularly at the national level. On the one hand, there are some encouraging signs. Even though the party branded the DA’s 2009 victory in the Western Cape as a triumph for ‘racists’, and referred to its main opposition as ‘the enemy’, the ANC did accept defeat.13 Even more significant was the relatively peaceful transfer of power from the ANC to opposition parties in the major municipalities of Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay after the 2016 local elections.
However, there have also been worrying indications that the party will not always be gracious in defeat. In the Western Cape, a few years ago, some ANC leaders declared in public that the ANC would seek to make the province ’ungovernable’, with the aim of unseating the DA. (These declarations only abated when Helen Zille, provincial premier and then leader of the DA, pointed out that these statements constituted a prima facie instance of sedition, and criminal charges were laid against ANC Youth League leaders.)14 In all three big cities the ANC lost in 2016, ANC councillors have also been involved in periodic violent skirmishes against the new leadership.15
Finally, and most disturbingly, the run-up to the 2016 municipal election was marred by a spate of political assassinations in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng,16 and another wave of killings broke out in KwaZulu-Natal in 2017. These served as a warning that some ANC functionaries were willing to kill to hold on to power. One can only hope that this murderous tendency does not serve as harbinger of the ANC’s attitude to electoral defeat.
If these three assumptions hold up – that the ANC’s decline will continue, that no opposition party will become dominant, and that elections will remain free and fair – coalition politics is guaranteed to emerge as the new leitmotiv for South African society. The rest of this book grapples with the implications. It is divided into three parts. The first part explains why it is only now, after more than two decades of democracy, that coalitions are set to become the default form of government. The second part explores what coalitions are likely to mean via three coalition scenarios. Finally, the third part looks at practical examples of how to make coalitions work.
Even if the ANC manages to sneak above the 50 per cent mark in 2019, its fast declining fortunes (as discussed in Chapter Two) make it clear that the era of one-party dominance is coming to an end. The simple reality is that the ANC will not remain in power forever – neither at the municipal, provincial nor national level. This book argues that the turning point at the national level will probably come in 2019, but the exact date of the ANC’s fall is less important than the fact that coalitions will soon become the default form of government in South Africa. Whether the ANC loses its national majority in 2019 or 2024, the key point is that wherever the party loses an election, it will likely be replaced by a coalition government. South Africans must urgently start preparing for this new reality.
Chapter Two
The decline of the ANC
Wednesday 3 August 2016, the day of the fifth round of municipal elections after South Africa’s transition to democracy, was a watershed in the country’s political history. Although some preceding by-elections had showed that electoral support for the ANC was declining, there was little concrete evidence that large numbers of ANC voters would ever abstain, or vote for any other political party. But on that fateful day in the winter of 2016, the first chinks in the ANC’s armour began to show.
The first sign that the ANC’s support was plummeting came in Cape Town, a bastion of opposition politics after the ANC’s defeat in the municipal elections in 2006. On the Thursday morning after the elections, Capetonians woke to the news that the DA was on its way to securing an overwhelming majority. By midday, it was all but confirmed: the DA had won 66.61 per cent of the Cape Town vote – the highest voting share ever achieved by any party in that city.
By the Friday, it was clear that the ANC had also been roundly defeated in the rest of the Western Cape, where it had only managed to get more votes than the DA in two out of 29 district and local municipalities. The ANC might have reasoned that, while the Western Cape results were unfortunate, they were not entirely unexpected. There was still hope that the damage might be limited to one province.
On Friday afternoon, though, those hopes were shattered when the IEC confirmed that the ANC had also lost Nelson Mandela Bay, home to Port Elizabeth, a major port and the Eastern Cape’s biggest city. It was a momentous defeat for the ANC in its traditional regional heartland. Defeat would have been unthinkable as recently as 2006, when the ANC won Nelson Mandela Bay with 67.61 per cent of the vote. Now, it could only muster 41.50 per cent. By contrast, the DA vote had swelled from 24.14 per cent in 2006 to 46.66 per cent. The convenor of the ANC’s Eastern Cape electoral task team, Beza Ntshona, conceded that this was a ‘painful’ blow in the home of the ANC, where, ‘for the first time since the dawn of democracy, the ANC has not won’.1
By the weekend, the nation’s attention was focused on Gauteng, scene of an epic battle for control of Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, and Johannesburg, its most economically significant city. At midday on Saturday 6 August, the IEC announced that the DA had taken Tshwane. It had garnered 43.10 per cent of the vote, up from 30.70 per cent in 2006, while the ANC vote had declined to 41.48 per cent from 57.32 per cent a decade earlier. The DA forged a coalition with the ACDP, COPE and the FF+, with support from the EFF, which took control of the capital city.2
But the ANC’s most significant defeat came in Johannesburg, where it lost control of the metro despite obtaining 44.50 per cent of the vote – nearly