The advent of a possible
national coalition government occasioned by an envisaged low electoral
performance of the ANC in 2024 has sparked puzzling thinking about the
coalition the ANC might have to form. At the same time, the government of
national unity cooperation between the ANC and the liberal right has surged.
The economic establishment, scholars, thinkers, and civil society movements
have begun pressing the governing ANC to prepare to scale back its commitment
to South Africa radically.
The inception of South
Africa's democracy with a coalition government of national unity despite an
outright majority vote for the ANC in 1994 was created to, amongst others,
demonstrate the sensitivity to majority rule by the political settlement and
prevention of possible civil strife ignited by political marginalisation of
'others'. Apart from the threat of peace by the then political violence in
KwaZulu Natal, South African political parties as a coalition behind the
success of its maturing political order never had to fight together or
coordinate joint action to any other matter, until the scourge of corruption
and its adjunct state capture threatened the basis of being South African and
the rule of law. Voter response to corruption, failures of service delivery,
and a gradual collapse of public infrastructure has fast-tracked fresh,
real-world evidence about how political coalitions can be a wake-up call and an
antidote to the arrogance of being a political majority.
The recent instabilities
in local government, and worryingly in the economic nodal points of South
Africa, confirm a growing sense of coalitions being formed not against the
political power of one dominant party but coalitions to balance against the
demonstrated threat of such a power. How these coalitions have thus far
behaved, notwithstanding their immaturity in coalition maintenance, has
revealed much about the thirst for (political) virtues and undergirding
enduring pathologies. The threat of a failed state and corruption-induced
oligarchy may have given these coalitions a new lease on life and shown the
value of the country's well-established constitutional procedures and checks
and balances. Despite society's discontent about the disruptive costs of
settling into a coalition government context, coalitions have further
underscored the degree to which coalition members and political parties remain
favourably dependent more on voter choices than what their parties impose on
society.
As South Africa's
democracy matures, and due to its diversities move towards a full-blown
multiparty democracy, coalitions, as we are experiencing in local government,
will matter more. In a context where no single political party stands
unchallenged as a hegemony, success will depend on the rival political party's
ability to form a coherent and capable coalition to exercise competitive power.
The recently experienced fissures in local government-based coalitions have
shown that coalitions formed without principle will result in service delivery
disaster if they fail to understand the collective message of a mandating voter
constituency, including abstainers.
The idea of coalitions
and how these balance power relations in contexts where minorities are a
dismembered majority voice against a below-threshold majority has been around
as a practice in societies whose arrangements on how to govern each other
allows it. It originates from contexts where parties join forces to check
powerful rivals and, more acutely, as a response to threats to human
livelihoods. In a post-conflict democracy like South Africa, dominant political
parties, especially when their mandates drift, can be more threatening than
weaker ones. However, of course, where they are located in a social cohesion
and nation-building sense and how their intentions are perceived can be equally
important. Dominant political parties are usually more worrisome to their
rivals, especially when they appear willing to use the power of their majority
or politics to change the status quo. This becomes a real threat in coalition
politics when ideologically synchronised parties come together away from a
preferred compromise centre.
This tendency explains
why the 'natural generational toenadering' between the ANC and the EFF threatens
a liberal consensus that was being non-racially threaded to include some from
within the liberation movements. Several liberation movement leaders have for a
while been reluctant liberals, save for the mischaracterisation of liberalism
as a white construct, and thus an exclusive domain of what Eddy Maloka refers
to as 'friends of the natives'.The ideologically stronger in the pursuance of
the liberal ideal for South Africa, and yet woefully pathetic in mustering the
requisite political and social capital, are facing the threat of losing
official opposition party status and the airtime that goes with it to control
the cadence of political discourse in South Africa.
The acceptance by the
ANC that 'it might not be alone in the dock, but it is accused number one in
corruption and state capture' has emboldened the necessity for an alternative
to the ANC, even amongst its most assertive supporters. The revelations at
various commissions of inquiry, mainly as a testimony to its acceptance of
guilt, as well as the opposition rituals of the EFF purportedly to position as
an alternative to the ANC, have worked to make it a potential official
opposition party, or the party that might get the second largest vote in 2024.
In ideological or posture proximity terms, the truncated youth generational
mission of the Julius Malema- led ANCYL of Economic Freedom in our Lifetime has
found resuscitation in its original designers, who are now dominant in the
ANC's decision structures. It can only be the abandonment of the ideals
espoused in the famous Gallagher Estates ANCYL National Conference resolutions
that would make a coalition pact with the EFF impossible. The mass appeal of
the EFF rhetoric is strikingly similar to the muted rhetoric about completing
the National Democratic Revolution through unlocking or disabling templates of
economic domination in South Africa.
With the choked leader
of society role of the ANC experiencing a resuscitation and foregrounding into
mainstream politics, the possibility of a coalition with the ANC cannot be
imagined outside what it historically stands for. Becoming antagonistic to the demands
and aspirations of its core constituency can only work if captains of the
industry come to the party and abandon their industrialisation investment
strike and create new hope for the youth beyond the vocation of being
revolutionaries without an ideology or institutional leadership structure.
There is a looming threat to the ANC's voter support. A logical response would
be getting closer to parties that have a historical, ideological fit with it.
Unfortunately for the
ANC, its reaction to the encroachment by political parties trading with
'left-leaning rhetoric' merely reinforces its need to foster a coalition
arrangement with them; otherwise, its historical base might be up for the
taking. The murmurings of a coalition of the left that might be constituted by
the left-leaning trade union movement, the variously organised
socialist-leaning civil society movements, and the doubtful-to-go-it-alone
South African Communist Party is already a real threat to the ANC's substrates
of ideological grounding as it had for most of its exile years relied on
Marxist tools of analysis, notwithstanding it not being a Marxist organisation.
The invasion of the
ANC's historical terrain of being a pro-poor organisation by civil society
movements, including movements that took up inside-the-constitution discontents
of society, confirmed the lingering doubts about the ANC becoming part of the
establishment and abandoning its pro-poor agenda at the altar of foreign and
local investor demands for structural adjustments. The traction with which the
inside-the-ANC radical economic transformation lobby, or faction as some would
prefer, imposed unprecedented limitations on the post-2017 NASREC ANC to
reclaim its historical and constitutionally correct posture of recognising the
injustices of our past and healing the divisions of the past and establishing a
society based on democratic values, social justice, and fundamental human
rights. Genuine reclaiming this posture would inevitably resuscitate what was
airbrushed as ANC policy and replaced by socio-economic transformation.
Consequently, there is
an exciting manifestation of policy incoherence when various State of the
Province Addresses by ANC-governed provinces are compared to the State of the
Nation Address. The policy pronouncements' managerial posture by the ANC's
politics also reflects a need to recalibrate its ideological posture and
reorient its functionaries operating at various centres of the state apparatus
and the private sector towards what it stands for. In tandem with its strategy
and tactics, document injunction that "in
order to exercise its vanguard role, the ANC puts a high premium on the
involvement of its cadres in all centres of power. This includes the presence
of ANC members and supporters in state institutions. It includes activism in
the mass terrain of which civil society structures are part. It includes the
involvement of cadres in the intellectual and ideological terrain to help shape
society's value systems. This requires a cadre policy that encourages
creativity in thought and practice and eschews rigid dogma. In this regard, the
ANC is responsible for promoting progressive traditions within the intellectual
community, including institutions such as universities and the media"
the ANC should think of its coalition according to who best represents what it
stands for. This rendition argues, save for the opposition posture and
political power interests of the EFF leadership, the EFF is a centre of power
and influence the strategy and tactics document might have envisaged, but not
in the immediate purview of the current leadership.
Suppose there are teams
that the ANC should pick up to balance against threats and not power, to post
1994 gains, a consideration of the revealing behaviour of non-establishment
political parties respond to the invitation to form a broad anti-ANC/EFF coalition.
Not only did their response indicate that they have not abandoned the
liberation promise the ANC has painstakingly weaved into the country's
constitution, but their posture was the loudest repudiation of coalitions that
are based on the maintenance of status quo politics, particularly the
sacredness of templates of economic dominance as a subject of political
coalescing. The ideological inadequacy of simply standing against a coalition
that might advance arrears of the liberation promise in the constitution might indicate
that non-historical establishment political parties are ready to create a
balance against threats to the genuine transformation of society and its
economy.
The strategic blunder
which the ANC might make under these conditions is failing to grasp the
readiness of non-historical-establishment political parties to defend the gains
of the post-1994 democratic breakthrough, including the service delivery
dimensions to it. Flirting with foreign direct investment theory and community
should not make the economic obsession with GDP growth that does not 'improve
the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person', as
the preamble of the constitutions declares, to derail how it structures
electoral pacts. CUT!!!
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