Making sense of the DA/ ANC Coalition: What might be the common factor?

The 2024 National Elections will be the most consequential in defining the true ideological position of the broad church of South Africa, the ANC. The liberation struggle, if enfranchisement was its fundamental goal, has ended. What might be outstanding is the pursuit of the National Democratic Revolution. The steady decline of support for the ANC over the last 15 years, with 2016 and 2021 as difficult-to-dispute indicators, has forced it into a coalition-thinking mode beyond its alliance with the SACP and COSATU. 

This has meant that the governing party context of South Africa has been radically altered. The one governing party model of politics does not meet the demands of this complex, rapidly changing phase of the democratic order. The concept of 'the people shall govern' is undergoing new iterations as the idea of political power battles to coexist with its multi-partied character. The time to make sense of what would justify a possible DA/ANC coalition government beyond the national unity exigencies that were instructional to the inaugural 1994 Mandela 1st administration is with us. 

 

That the DA is a liberal party with a predominantly non-BantuBlack support base is indisputable. It has positioned itself as the custodian of an 'equal opportunities without guaranteed equal outcomes' political system. While it recognises injustice in South Africa, it has argued that restitution must coexist with aspects of the status quo, save for compensation if the exigencies of true restitution demand material alterations to the beneficiaries of past injustices. 

 

The ANC, up until it was banned, WAS a liberal construct. Its early formation political rhetoric was not only espousing Wilberforcean liberalism but very deliberate in its demand for the extension of civil rights to 'blacks in general and Africans in particular'. Inclusion into the constitutional order built for a post-South African War 'colonial state' through the extension of franchise rights became the core of its politics. There is no evidence of any ideological leaning outside of being liberal until its banning in 1960.

 

Save for being an integral part of the mobilisation of society to participate in the development of the 1955 Congress of the People, which adopted the Freedom Charter as the expression of the 1943 African Claims in a broadened context, the ANC had several attempts to define itself ideologically outside the liberal character it was posturing. Closest to an ideological characterisation of the ANC is its advocacy for human rights through a 1923 conference resolution. This resolution resulted in  The African Bill of Rights of 1923 the ANC masterminded and arguably contributed to what would later become the UN Charter of Human Rights and the present-day Bill of Rights in the Constitution of South Africa. Even still, the content of its human rights document was etched in its civil rights and liberal traditions. 

The conditions of being banned necessitated an ideological mid-course correction. In the heat of a Cold War, the pressure to have an ideological bias, especially because apartheid South Africa's propaganda machinery was pigeonholing it as a communist front, the material conditions of the era defined it as a candidate force of the left. This was despite its insistence that it is a broad church with no set ideological dogma beyond what the preamble of the Freedom Charter espouses. 

Reading through The Road to South African Freedom document indicated that the ideation prowess of the SACP, as part of the Alliance, is arguably the source of the ANC's NDR posture. It is clear, as Ivor Chipkin submits, that the CST theory came to account for apartheid, and NDR became an elaboration of tasks that the liberation movement had to perform to overcome apartheid. The shift deeper into the left was thus an existential necessity in ideological terms. The ANC's accounts and literature, including the wobbly broad church characterisation of the ANC itself, would make a trend reader not be shocked if the ANC contests a liberal posture to define its reason for existence. 

Emerging out of CODESA, the Constitutional Principles it has agreed to and the commitments to the Basic Structure of the constitutional order it made are all a cocktail of what has made South Africa to be able to be democratic. The negotiated Constitution of South Africa in 1996, albeit carrying the NDR objectives of a non-racial, non-sexist, united, and democratic society based on social justice and the respect of human dignity, has also entrenched liberal order characteristics. The triumph of the liberal order after the disintegration of the global left coalition with the Soviet Union as its global power node, as well as the triumph of state capitalism in China, has created favourable conditions for liberalism to be a safer ideological posture. 

This might well explain why almost all major policy initiatives launched by post-apartheid South Africa -including the late just transition in the electricity space, universal health coverage otherwise known as National Health insurance, characterisation of OPEX as supernumerary in social services, and classification of citizens as clients or customers of the state- has been managed away from the socialist posture the ANC sold during the liberation struggle days. The emerging "new model for governing - a combination of governmental and non-governmental organisations, private and public partnerships, and novel business arrangements to meet public demands- defines the triumphant liberal order's policy architecture. The systemic coalition with capital on the service delivery terrain has moved the ANC to a centre that can only attract liberalism as an appropriate label to characterise the ANC. 

 

The DA, save for its unfortunate racial composition and latest posture to defend whiteness with a liberalist order construct, is ideologically the largest party to fit with the consistent liberal character found or settling within the ANC and arguably dominant since President Ramaphosa became its leader. Noises or voices opposed to an ANC/DA coalition can only succeed if they are etched in what instructs the policy posture of the ANC or DA, for that matter. The opportunity to posture the ANC to attune its principles for entering a coalition with other parties has passed with the policy and electoral conferences of 2022. 

There is a near consensus today that the governing party, in policy and practice, has entered a new era. But how it postures to define and navigate this new era must be clarified. With an eroded policy-making sophistication in the ANC, and because of a complex private sector and geopolitical interests pursuing lobbying prowess, few people can offer as informed and comprehensive a view of the strategic benefits of the ANC coalition-building policy, especially at a moment when it is in a renewal mode and rethinking its strategic objectives and sometimes struggling to find new ways of pursuing them.

As a Sepedi saying goes, "ya tsentšha tlhaku e nwele"... (if a cow's leg is inside a water fountain, the water is considered drank). CUT!!