The curse of South Africa’s coalitions

It has come to be broadly accepted that if the ANC get under 50% in the 29 May general election, it will not be because they lost the election to one party, but that a combination of parties has taken enough votes off of them to make them lose their majority.

And the result will be a coalition government at national level.

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The country has already seen what chaos coalition arrangements have brought at municipal level and if the same pattern is to be followed at national or provincial level, then the country will be in more trouble than it is already.

The demise of Roger Jardine’s three-month old aspirant rainbow party before it had even taken part in an election can in part explain South Africa’s coalition problem which, at its root, is: all new and old opposition parties have this delusion that they are offering the South African political landscape something completely new.

Jardine’s Change Starts Now sounded like someone had just woken up one day and discovered that South Africa has a newly discovered or defined problem and that change must start right now to solve this problem.

This might be disappointing news to Jardine, Songezo Zibi’s Rise Mzansi, Mmusi Maimane’s Build One South Africa (Bosa) and Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA: there is nothing new about their offering to South Africa’s opposition politics.

South Africa’s biggest political problem has always been that the party with the majority to govern could not implement its noble mandate because of greed.

Those tasked with being opposition to the ruling party have, in the past, got sucked into the internal politics of the ANC, just as the Democratic Alliance (DA) is screaming the loudest about cadre deployment when they themselves practise it, instead of offering a credible alter native to South Africans.

Promises dating from 1994

Opposition parties must not sell South Africans dreams of “a new 1994”. South Africans know how “a new South Africa” panned out after the 1994 promises.

The race lines across the political divide deepened more than ever and although it might not be immediately obvious, it is those race and ideological divides that define South African opposition today.

All major opposition parties today are either breakaways from the DA (Bosa, ActionSA, Good Party) or the ANC (Economic Freedom Fighters, uMkhonto weSizwe Party, United Democratic Movement and the now defunct Congress of the People).

The rest are just really personality-driven parties like Gayton McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance, Kenneth Meshoe’s African Christian Democratic Party and the late Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party.

Instead of selling the country a “new 1994”, they should all be selling South Africans the practicalities of setting aside the race and ideological divides that prevent them from forming coalitions that work.

ALSO READ: Ramaphosa warns ANC supporters about ‘dysfunctional’ coalition governments

Bringing the ANC under 50% might be easier than the work that needs to follow. If they bring down the ANC, is the DA bold enough to realise that their politics of representing just the niche 15 to 20% South Africans will not work for SA?

That it is at odds with the EFF’s 10 to 15% radical youth? Will they shake off their race and ideological strangleholds and realise that governing just the Western Cape and a few metros is not enough to bring a new ’94. Mashaba, Zibi and Maimane essentially offer the same and will need to fit in with the bigger parties.

The Moonshot Pact without the EFF is what will drive the EFF into the arms of the ANC like it happened in Joburg and Ekurhuleni metros. No-one needs a reminder of how dysfunctional and dilapidated those metros are with compromise “smaller candidate” puppet mayors.