As early as 2004, when the governing African National Congress
received 45% of the Western Cape Provincial votes, few policy analysts,
scholars, and pundits in South Africa were waxing lyrical about the stirrings
of a coalition politics future in the making. They appreciated the truth of a
majority rule system being put on a test to survive the minority rights
protection inscribed in the Constitution by the 2004 coalition arrangement
between the ANC and the New National Party. The appreciation acknowledged the
difficulty these coalition realities will put on the post-liberation majority
rule expectations of liberation movements the ANC had modelled itself into. But
overall, the conventional wisdom held that the CODESA negotiations inspired a shift
to experimenting with a mix of majority rule that would ensure the stability the new democratic order requires is
protected.
The
requirement to make the arrangements with which South Africans in a constituent
assembly have agreed we would govern ourselves realisable was to the ANC
obligatory. In the early days of post-apartheid South Africa, a context of
reconciliation, with its discontents, was established as a condition for the
rolling out of the democratic order to happen. A government of national unity
would oversee the transition from an Apartheid State to a post-apartheid
Constitutional Democracy. The economic order was synchronised to embrace a new
cocktail Establishment threaded with an 'independent judiciary' emerging as the
final arbiter of all unresolved and historically significant discontents.
The
battle for the soul of South African politics had begun long before the
settlement into a 1996 Constitution, valorised as monumental in how a new nation-state
was threaded. The first non-racial coalition was the 1955 Congress of the
People, out of which South Africa defined a vision of a society, nation, and
state no human being could deny it being worthy of the struggle and sacrifices
to attain a political order that guarantees it. The coalition did not have a
requisite franchise to affect the vision but instead had the legitimacy beyond
where it was restricted to establish a context of what an apartheid-free South
Africa could look like. The Freedom Charter became a coalition-building
instrument no human argument could fault in the way it articulated great
demands for freedom into nuggets of statements only an elaborate Constitution
could translate into a legal tool all agencies of the state could be obligated
to work towards.
In
entering the constitutional negotiations process, the African National Congress
agreed to principles with which a new Constitution for South Africa would be
defined. One of the core conditions the ANC put, even before the principles
could be translated into a Constitution, was the demand that only freely
elected representatives of the people of South Africa could write and adopt
such a Constitution. As a coalition charged with drafting the Constitution,
these representatives would be called a Constituent Assembly. It would resolve
its deadlocks through the legal system and thus ignite transformative
constitutionalism. As a firmament to anchor all demands of humanity and South
Africans in particular, a basic structure upon which the Constitution as a
social architectural piece would stand was proffered for endorsement by all in
the coalition to write a Constitution.
The
basic structure represented a thesis of a society where apartheid or chauvinism
could thrive legally or otherwise. Regarding the basic structure doctrine,
"the doctrine determines that an amendment is unconstitutional if it
infringes, negates or substitutes the basic structure of the Constitution,
regardless of whether all the formal and procedural requirements for the
amendment are met. This does in the main target majority rule where such is a
threat to the fundamental characteristics of the Constitution. In South Africa,
the Constituent Assembly as a coalition to draw a Constitution worked on a
basic structure of 'separation of powers', 'entrenching each arm of the State
with its distinct authority' protected against the overreach of the other, and
operating to ensure a listed set of principles. These principles were agreed to
be 'democracy, equality, reconciliation,
diversity, responsibility, respect and freedom'.
As
the politics of power started to gain traction and prominence, those that led
society to a constitutional democracy which set its sights beyond human greed
got entangled in the vortex of balancing personal interests with those of a community
still requiring leadership. With claims, of whatever nature, quickly becoming
the currency of politics - personal aggrandisement, defence of the ill-gotten
gains during apartheid, the insatiable appetite for the economically dominant
to keep the templates of economic dominance intact, the legitimate demands for
economic redress and thus economic freedom for all, and many other social
justice defendable demands in society - constitutional development as the apex
interest to ensure the stability of the democratic order has receded. Political
coalitions have, in the process, started to lose the lustre of being about
principles but instead assumed a character of being about 'what is in it for
me'. One result of this turmoil has been the revival of a term that had come to
seem anachronistic during the anti-apartheid struggle of utopian visions of
unbridled majority rule without due regard to the proportionality guaranteed in
the Constitution. The disregard and disrespect, with impunity, of what the
voters wanted has become the order of the democratic order in local
government.
With
the reality of coalition politics looming significant for the provincial and
national government, the question becomes what checks, and balances are there
to ensure that the state withstands the shocks that will come from our
politics. Arguably, since there is no real difference between the legitimacy of
politicking and the need for higher-order activism from politicians to protect
the Constitution and the democratic state, it will be difficult to fault the
necessity of coalitions, notwithstanding their recent disruptive nature. In
this sense, political parties, and those that continue to see themselves as
leaders of society in particular, should start performing their traditional
role, with what they stood for in the past acting merely as a manifestation of
the checks and balances that are central to their interpretation of the essence
of what the liberation promise was all about.
Historically,
politics have been construed as using state or government power to advance
(personal or otherwise) interests. But that simple definition has ceased to
capture reality when the reconstruction and development of society are at the centre.
The risks South Africa and its democracy face are more numerous and complicated
than in the apartheid and anti-apartheid era. To handle these new challenges,
leaders of society across sectors must redefine the concept of liberation or a better
life for all and develop new means of ensuring it. It should be this
redefinition which should be instructive to the types and character of
coalitions which emerge in the run-up to the 2024 National and Provincial
elections. Without a doubt, the preamble of the Constitution should be the
basis of all coalition agreements, especially where it declares, "we
therefore, through our freely elected representatives, adopt this Constitution
as the supreme law of the Republic to
· Heal
the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values,
social justice and fundamental human rights;
· Lay
the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based
on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law;
· Improve
the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and
· Build
a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a
sovereign state in the family of nations.
Although
these injunctions of the preamble are obligatory to all citizens, and as
principles are familiar, the traditional methods of dealing with them will
prove insufficient in this new era of coalitions, as we have seen in the
Metropolitan Municipalities; political parties still qualifying as leaders of
society policymakers will need new brigades than what has to date paraded
itself as available talent thus far.
There
is no reason to give up hope yet. The 2016 and 2021 municipal elections, which
have displayed the repudiation of the governing party by those that went to
vote in Metropolitan Municipalities, should have sparked innovation on the part
of political parties on the need to introduce the vibrance of youth. The crisis
of a potential loss of political power in the national sphere of government
should likewise lead to novel ideas and techniques as long as the new leader of
society that fully grasp the new realities in the face of our politics is
allowed to shape the democratic order further. CUT!!! To be continued...
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