The idea of a one-party majority governing party might have run
its last race in the sixth administration of South Africa. Majority rule might
henceforth be an outcome of a consensus of the political elite coming together
as minorities to create a governing majority threshold. South Africa might be
experiencing the early phases of its disintegration into distinct,
interrelated, and interdependent political jurisdictions managed by different
political parties.
This time, there is a
strategic competition between those provinces ready to 'go it alone', and a no
50% majority has taken hold in major urban centres, especially Western Cape and
Gauteng. There is no question that the liberation movement's power and hegemony
at the centre have surged since the Polokwane leadership change. The various
legitimacies of the political order with the liberation movement as its lead
have been contentious and undergoing moral liquidation.
In
addition to their admission to being accused number one in the dock where the
corruption trial is being heard, the capacity to self-correct and generate new
hope about the democratic order has fallen to its lowest ebb. But it is up to
the emerging post-2023 election political power brokers to decide whether to
keep South Africa on its new nation-building path. Their perceptions and
assumptions about political power and coalition agreements and arrangements
will shape the reality of our constitutional and democratic order.
Managed
properly, these coalitions might foster stability. If handled poorly, it might
plunge the country into a political stalemate whose outcome might deepen
polarisations. With the toning down of political rhetoric about the seventh
administration, a new wave of South Africa's first pragmatism is taking shape
amongst the advanced thinking of most political parties. The contest for state
power is taking the shape of rival models of implementing the constitutional
order by toning down and introducing new ideological postures.
Save
for the property clause interpretation battles, particularly the emotional
expropriation without compensation; the contest is about state power as it is
configured. Most parties know that to change the fundamentals, they require
majorities few will muster in the lifetime of the current leaders. With South
Africa receding to rigid regionalism and somewhat fuelled by resurgent
tribalism, coalitions have the inherent risk of fragmenting the unitary
character of an otherwise perfect for federalism democracy.
The
rivalries between South African political parties, which are choked by a highly
funded consensus of its ruling class, are more about how to make the current
political, democratic, and constitutional order work. The balance of capacities
and calibration of political-social-financial capital each political party has
access to will shape the character of a coalition government we end up with as
a society. The flirting of smaller parties with Israel should signal to South
Africa that a Likud Party of Israel condition piloted in Joburg Metropolitan
municipality might be ready for scaling.
What
has been managed out of the oncoming electioneering is having political parties
see each other through ideological lenses. South Africa's ideological debate is
settled, and the Constitution is the ideology. It directs politics, economy,
and society and does not allow any deviation that might challenge its status as
the country's supreme law.
The
Constitution has already provided a sustainable bridge between the past of a
deeply divided society characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and
injustice and a future it entrenches as the non-negotiable source of
legislative, judicial, and executive authority. It articulates the obligations
of all legal persons to respect, protect, promote, and fulfil the rights in the
Bill of Rights. It is the legal basis for the state to execute a project of
transforming society in all respects.
The
program to reduce the influence of politics or their formations on the
livelihoods of South Africans is advanced. The reduced influence of the state
on what has historically been regarded as the commanding heights of an economy
is almost complete. For all intents and purposes, the South African state has lost
control over the network industries of electricity, energy, water, and
logistics. It has surrendered to private health care and private basic
education.
As
any party but the ANC movement gains momentum, the thought of a South Africa
under a coalition government might be a perfect cocktail for a political
stalemate. The new coalition context will define a new era in the global south.
The established political and constitutional order is defensive of the liberal
order the South African Constitution is broadly about. Distasteful as it is for
those in the rhetoric of being a force of the left, issues which the 2024
elections are about reflect a desire to resist further Zanufication of South
Africa in Blade Nzimande parlance.
The
homogenous character of South Africa's middle class, whose ideological outlook
of the world has become a platform upon which a liberal agenda is being
deployed. Its societal connections and network ties have exerted political
influence with which the current coalition government negotiations cannot veer
off the centre the middle class has defined. The battle to be centre is fast
defining the post-1994 right as the new centre. The left can only survive as an
appendage of the left in the centre; otherwise, it is suffocated. CUT!!
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