This was published in the Sunday Times on 02 June 2024
As the ink on the ballot
papers dries, South Africa stands at a pivotal moment, grappling with
fundamental questions. The Parliament is in suspense, with the
governing party falling short of the required 50% threshold. It has struggled to secure more than 40% voter support in the provincial sphere. The economic
powerhouses of South Africa are now in the hands of negotiators. The ANC's
opposition and the ‘wenzeni uZuma’ movement, a significant player in these
elections, have united to form a formidable coalition government player in KZN,
Gauteng, and the National sphere.
Therefore, coalition
arrangements will be in provinces with significant metropolitan areas governed
by coalitions. The coalition government by all cost movement is moving forward
fitfully into the provincial and national spheres of government. This
movement's advantage in understanding how to make its majority of minorities
power, which it has consolidated its experience about in local government, work
in its favour as it increases its hegemonic power is now a reality the
democratic order has contended with.
South Africa has crossed
a threshold, ushering in a monumental shift in the political power structure.
We are entering an era of intense coalition government, a landscape that will
not only reshape the power dynamics in the nine provinces, 44 district
municipalities, 8 metropolitan municipalities, and countless local
municipalities but also fundamentally change the distribution and exercise of
power. The political outcome of the 2024 national and provincial elections is a
coalition government, a stark departure from the government of national unity
in 1994.
The emerging political
power configurations will have profound implications for the interactions and
transactions between spheres of government. The era of arbitrary political
decisions on intergovernmental relations issues is over; authority, power, and
competencies must be negotiated. All outstanding regulatory frameworks ignored as
IGR was managed through 'family affair' mechanisms must be negotiated and
promulgated. The tension between prerogative party-political decisions and the
normative dictates of the constitutional order will be disabled. The true power
of representative democracy through Parliament and its Chapter 9 and 10
institutions will be foregrounded as the pillar of RSA's democratic
order.
The national and
provincial budgets are facing a new challenge, yet to be spatially expressed.
The fiscus's response to coalition arrangements will require a level of
intergovernmental relations maturity envisaged in the Constitution. As the
political power ambitions of contesting parties come into play, the cooperation
and collaboration between organs of state, elected or appointed, will be
tested. The expectation for the public service to loyally execute the lawful
policies of the government of the day will be stretched to its limits. Instead
of deploying people into the public service, the state will be compelled to use
the existing constitutional framework and commission citizens to do public
service.
South Africa will
require a massive public service relearning intervention to unlearn
institutionalised one-party statism. The ‘public service’ in the legislatures,
which has conducted itself as a bureaucracy of the governing parties, including
the Western Cape, will require recalibration to levels where the legislative
authority of the Republic will be reflected in their conduct. In the run-up to the
2024 national elections, public administration and public service legislations,
which had one dominant party-political system as a background of permanence,
were promulgated. With the ascendance of coalition government into the national
sphere of government, the conditions to have a normative policy discourse on
public service reform are now in place. The science of public administration
and public service will find a higher position than that of the party-defending
audiences. The professionalisation of public service will be a logical reset
button to press as the country looks beyond the post-liberation euphoria and
embraces a South Africa that belongs to all mandates in the preamble of the
Constitution.
Given the rhetoric which
preceded the elections, especially the anything but ANC, the coalition
government battle dynamics will have no defined South African cause outside the
liberation promise in the Constitution. When the opposition complex mobilised
for a majority of minorities and the reintroduction, in practice, of the
unresolved federalism debate at CODESA, the governing party focused on
consolidating the power of an otherwise disintegrating one dominant multiparty
democratic order. As the opposition complex constructed a network of civil
society fortifications to disentangle the bond between the governing party and
its loyal and voting-averse support base, leadership integrity challenges of
the governing party compromised its ability to consolidate state power
commensurate with its national democratic revolution ideals.
The rush to legislate for
managing political matters with the law will be exposed as coalition politics
undo the one dominant party-influenced policy architecture. In the absence of a
vibrant and unencumbered constitution-defending civil society entity,
constitutional delinquency, manifest in laws that encroached on the distinct
character of spheres of government and the managerial discretionary rights and
obligations of the public service bureaucracy, survived the actual test of
congruence with what the constitutional order provides. Attempts at legislating
a single public service or public sector, as the new nomenclature goes, will be
upended to allow the true intents of subsidiarity and decentralisation the
constitutional order is by design about.
The dialogue former
President Mbeki advocates will be incomplete if it is not pronounced in the sub-contextual
unitary-federal debate. With the surge of regional rigidities and identity
political mobilisation, the new relationships and relations between and amongst
spheres of government, and the rapid integration of the RSA political economy into
the global economic order, the instability of the democratic order will
continue to worsen until it reaches the tipping point. The battle for the
post-liberation trough in the past thirty years allowed, if not facilitated,
the capture of the intellectual discourse to shape the democratic order to
withstand conditions the 2024 national elections have created.
It is also true that the
anti-apartheid complex of democrats would have known that trying to teach a
system built on subverting the will of the people, apartheid, would be like
attempting to counteract years of indoctrination, system-sustaining training
and own affairs or ethnic self-awareness. Fortunately or otherwise, coalition
arrangements are a breeding ground for the resuscitation of lost causes as much
as they are an opportunity to become laboratories within which society can
experiment with what works for them.
Former President Thabo
Mbeki characterises coalitions as a political product; the question is, what
was the intercourse to arrive where we are, and what is the genetic makeup of
the product and, thus, the coalitions emerging from that place? In democracies
where coalitions work, national interest pursuit is the dominant substrate
guiding all interests. The dialogue Mbeki advocates must settle the national
interest debate selfishly. Except for the political template that shifted
during the 2024 national elections, in South Africa, ‘tomorrow is another
country’, our yesterdays will never come back. Cut!!
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