Is our democracy at risk or enhanced by coalitions.

After the Mandela-led Constituent Assembly adopted the 1996 Constitution, the ideal of a non-racial, non-sexist, united, and democratic South Africa looked set to define a new nationhood. The racial and equality tensions that characterised society seemed to have melted into the liberation promise the Constitution guaranteed all citizens. After centuries of land dispossessions and racial discrimination, creating templates for a legalised social order, a race-defined caste system, and an institutionalised racial economic hierarchy, South Africa opted for democracy, human dignity, human rights, and social justice. 

Few South Africans were unhappy at the prospect of being one nation and committed to building a new democratic order. However, this ideal underestimated the institutional legacy of the apartheid ideal of seeing South Africans as ethnic and racial enclaves of humanity destined to develop separately. The endurance of ethnic and racial nationalism seems to have been undermined as a possible political mobilisation force by maverick leaders. The dividends of the spatial engineering of human settlements have made such mobilisations a social normality that the non-racial mindset is bowing to the rigidities of ethnic-defined regionalisms. 

With the 2024 National and Provincial elections promising to be the most consequential in defining the resilience of South Africa as a democratic order, the form and character of political mobilisation under the guise of coalitions have demonstrated that South Africa might not have decisively dealt with the 'national question'. The terrain of electoral contestations provides a platform for race and ethnic-defined political mobilisation as the new instrument to sustain the apartheid-era-created racial oligarchy governed through an untransformed economic order. 

While the democratic order is not yet at pornographic risk, the liberation promise that the constitutional order guarantees the majority of South Africans might be endangered by a perfect storm of coalition government arrangements that could have interests aimed at choking critical aspects of the very liberation promise. Since the political power shifts of 2016 and 2021 in metropolitan and densely urbanised municipal governments, there has been a marked backslide in advancing the fracturing of templates of economic dominance the constitutional order has codified as the new normal. Through litigation, jurisprudence is recalibrating the lawfulness of many an aspect of the liberation promise and thus tinkering with how healing the injustices of the past settles as a memory of the future. 

Unlike outright denial of opportunities to those subjugated by a politically defeated racial oligarchy, coalition political arrangements have craftily used hung municipal voter outcomes to gradually redirect, if not choke, the cadence of the liberation promised by rewriting the economic transformation and related playbooks that were beginning to take root. 

Notwithstanding, out of the coalition arrangements, there had been green shoots of wanting to build South Africa as an open society democratic order with equal opportunities that do not guarantee equity of outcomes. Municipal coalition governments have, at least in their rhetoric and spasmodic implementation, realised that the democratic order will only survive if it adapts and revitalises itself for new generations facing significant challenges, ranging from energy, water, and logistics security to growing inequality, as manifest by chronic unemployment. 

With a near memory history of apartheid, this intense, emerging comprehension of South Africanness cannot imagine society through non-racial and caste-free lenses. This has impacted the ideological basis of political coalitions in South Africa. While there is an apparent battle for the 'liberal soul' of South Africa, with the ANC pulling it towards the liberal left with socialist rhetoric, the DA is drawing towards a liberal left with an unfortunate racial supremacist lace that subscribes to a South African specific notion of right-wing definition. The convenience of mobilising around an anti-ANC ticket, with the sad service delivery and corruption track record of the past fifteen years, has blurred the view of society to realise that the socio-political demise of what the ANC stands for ideologically might mean a tacit collusion in the rejection of the liberation promise in the Constitution. 

The conflictual character of opposing the ANC as a governing party and separating how you oppose it from its liberation movement characteristics seems to be only mastered by the EFF, save for its rhetoric not being able to transcend perceptions of it being anti-white. The intertwining of the ANC-as-a-liberation-movement objectives with the essence of the constitutional order has made the failings of the ANC as the governing party, including the failings of its leaders as personalities, put to risk the democratic and constitutional order. It is in the interface of the two ANCs that South Africa has to deal with, which makes the coalition arrangement a risk to the liberation promise and, by extension, the liberal order. 

On the other hand, the true integrity of a democratic order is the ability of its beneficiaries to determine how it configures the government of the day through the lawful means it has adopted. In any case, democracy, at its zenith or apex, "should represent popular control over decision making…and equality (of opportunity) between citizens in the exercise of that control.” 

One of the tenets of democracy is its demand for continuous political discourse, debate and respect for dissent. To meet this demand, state power should guarantee the cardinal freedoms of assembly, expression, association, speech, and conscience. Reducing, if not eliminating, the growing chasm between citizens, state institutions, and those with the executive authority in a state should be the preoccupation of a democratic order. Those commissioned to the vocation of politics in a democratic order like South Africa have an added responsibility to separate truth from chaff in dealing with the ideological realities entrusted to our constitutional order. 

While history might record the triumph of voter self-determination in the emerging coalition government phase of South Africa as a dimension of its liberation promise dividends, there will still be a strain in how this development might have become vulnerable to underhanded objectives of choking the transformation objectives of the liberation project. Coalitions, in their pursuit of the democratic nature of Lincolnian of, for, and by the people, should be protected from mutating into a proxy battle terrain to stop the legitimate expectations of resolving national grievances against apartheid and colonialism. We should include the visceral motivations of those interested in the truncation of the ANC as the liberation movement in how we analyse our somewhat legitimate celebration of the dimension of freedom coalitions can bring if de-Zanufication of our politics is put into the mix. 

The brute truth is South Africa still requires a political centre that will hold the restitution centre intact. The dislodgement of the liberation movement as the governing party in certain municipal jurisdictions has demonstrated what political and social capital costs South Africa has had to pay to close a pothole. With murmurings of the 1996 settlement requiring a review, it remains unclear what type of coalition the ANC might form opposite to the 'anything but the ANC coalition'. Content-deficient sloganeering might find new traction. The coalition government reality offers insights into the natural leader of society brigades. Assuming theirs is the pursuit of the liberation promise in the Constitution, coalition arrangements present an opportunity to reset the country to constitutional defaults without a dangerous political control-alt-delete the environment seems to be pursuing. CUT!