Political music chairs: ‘Coalitions need to end conflicts to work’

Coalitions are the future of our politics but there needs to be a way to end conflict among parties in coalitions which leads to chaos and a lack of service delivery.

This was the issue under discussion at the National Dialogue on Coalition Governments at the University of the Western Cape yesterday.

DA Western Cape premier Alan Winde said: ”In the political sphere, we play musical chairs. We find politicians thinking of office space, cars and support instead of the people who elected them to office.”

Delivering his keynote address, Deputy President Paul Mashatile noted that the deliberations on coalitions were several years late.

He said although democracy was continuously evolving, there was little collective reflection among the broad sections of South Africa’s leadership.

“Had we paused earlier to reflect on how best to promote and maintain consensus in our evolving democracy, we might have avoided some of the recent distressing scenes that have played out in some of our metropolitan municipalities,” he said.

Mashatile added that the frequent collapse of coalitions on local government level was sometimes deliberate and not for the public good.

He said the distressing problems with recent coalition experiences at local government level in the country’s major metropolitan municipalities included;

• Opportunistic political behaviour enabled by institutional loopholes;
• Lack of a threshold for the admissibility of a motion of no confidence and vulgarisation of processes not related to considerations of ethics and competence;
• The monetisation of votes and seats in municipal governance – patronage/rent-seeking, and;
• Power play, relevance and ganging up against incumbents.

“There should be a stronger focus on good governance and corruption-free administrations,” he said.

Political analyst Goodenough Mashego said it was important to note that the powers of provincial governments were regulated as “we live in a unitary state” and provinces did not have the kind of powers national government had which meant it was not a federal system where provinces could enact laws.

“So I don’t think we need to tamper with that arrangement… we need to strengthen national legislation to make sure that in the future, provinces do not talk about recession,” he said.