Published in the Sunday Times on 22 October 2023
A performance of less than 50% by South African political parties in the 2024 national and provincial elections will result in
coalition governments. Opinion polls indicate there might not be a 50% winner in the national elections. Mzwandile Masina, former mayor
of Ekurhuleni, submits that coalition government occurs when no single
political party attains majority votes from an election, thereby opting to
combine votes to form a government. He concludes that it is through the control
of the executive authority of a country that political parties establish a
national or any other political executive to enforce their desired policies on
the polity.
Given that the state is not only an institution with power but the
most permanent of human-created institutions, its longevity makes it the
ultimate prize of anyone contesting to be the government of the day in an
election. Election outcomes are, therefore, about which hegemony or ideology
will prevail over the resources and distributive power of the state. This hegemony has, in the post-1994
constitutional and democratic order, been in the firm grip of the African
National Congress because it could consistently amass, although declining, more
than 50% of the votes of those who cared to vote. In a less than 50%
performance by all parties, the hegemonic power of the ANC as a governing party
will be truncated, as we saw in the major metropoles of South Africa.
Democracy is not only the
arrangements with which society has agreed to govern itself but a government
of, for, and by the people. At the heart of any democratic process in society
is the question of political and economic power. It is not just the right to
vote but a means through which humanity can guarantee its right to live in
dignity and, in that way, have as a sacred outcome social justice and freedom. In
its purest form, a democracy should enable society to experience it through the
ease at which it can change the government of the day without impacting its
established constitutional and democratic order. In this respect, South Africa
is growing into a benchmark in the developing world to demonstrate the
legitimacy of electoral democracy to change the government of the day.
Focus on the impact of a
less than 50% electoral result by RSA political parties has to date been only on
the political ramifications. The more significant impact, I argue, will be how
this will affect the Public Service as an institution or mind of the State
expected to support the 7th Administration. When the government of the day
changes, a new political network ascends institutions of power; this means
configurations of state, political, bureaucratic, and economic power will
change. The bureaucracy, especially the senior management service, is always
the first to feel the heat of political changes after an election.
The central national
question is what the new or impending coalition executive authority should do
to utilise the advantage of context to benefit the permanent state or a
commissioned public service. Besides accepting that in government, there will
always be two sets of employees, career and political, the coalition executive
authority must appreciate that government lacks budget flexibility, and the two
sets of employees have multiple employers in all spheres of government and
institutions with a sufficient organ of stateness as a responsibility. This
appreciation should include understanding that 'the permanent state' or public
(or civil) service can wait for the coalition executive out.
The public service, the
'permanent mind of the state' which outlives elected officials' tenure, is
composed of appointed officials whose organ of state status constitutes what a
state is. The public service is not the government of the day; it is the state.
The institutions making up the public administration system of a country, which
embody the power and authority the Constitution of a country gives them, depend
for their success on the 'commissioned competence' in the Public Service.
The South African
Constitution provides basic values and principles governing public administration,
the operational field of Public Service. The Constitution specifies that
"within public administration, there is a Public Service for the Republic
which must function and be structured in national legislation, which must
loyally execute the lawful policies of the government of the day". In
a less than 50% outright winner context, a coalition will be government of the
day. The executive and legislative authority of the Republic will vest in a
coalition between the President and Parliament, respectively. There will be a
coalition Cabinet, and the prerogative of the President will be curtailed. In
the hands of a 'South Africa first' cohort of coalition leaders, the country
might again emerge with higher-order objectives for society to chase.
The new coalition order
would require a bureaucracy that understands the ramifications and lawfulness
of the policies they should execute, support, and ultimately enact and the
effect of what that would be doing on society. The organ of stateness that goes
with being the mind of the state requires from the public service a key grasp
of the liberation promise the Constitution has bequeathed to
society. These potential reconfigurations of political arrangements to
constitute a coalition government of the day can be an opportunity to reset how,
as a society, we should be commissioning from among our professionals those who
will be a 'permanent capable mind of the state' that will 'loyally execute the
lawful policies of the government of the day'.
The risk, however, is
that left to execute authority coalition arrangements, which would naturally
perceive or find state bureaucracy distant and unmanageable, the possibility of
new policy czars reversing the gains of public administration reform and
stabilisation is real. This might even violate the collaborative government
principles of non-encroachment into other state authorities, and the Supremacy
of the Constitution and the rule of law might be a casualty.
This article summarises
a Thinc Foundation Working Paper Vol 2 Issue 3 delivered at the SAAPAM conference on the subject.
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