This was published in the Sunday Times, 13 April 2025.
South Africa should not take lightly the idea that no one party has absolute power to govern. It is disruptive to historically established strategic networks and new ones. Nodes of influence have lost significant ground over several aspects of South Africa's state power. The change, though not yet visible to those who believe in the dream of returning to power, is undergoing structural metamorphosis. History’s infrastructure is arguably under construction. What is contested in public is temporary and fluid.
It might have been too
early in the life of a transitioning democracy to have the centre of political
power diffused. South Africa's challenges have developed a tendency to always
invite its history into everything about its present. Invariably, where
the nation is expected to work together, it defaults into adversarial
collaboration. Disagreement has become an axiomatic point of departure because
of the growing trust deficit among South Africans. This condition is so severe
that some South Africans are actively working for the state to be militarily or
nationally weak.
Coalition governments, institutionalised
by arrangements for how to govern each other, are emerging as a solution to
negotiating a new South Africa amid differences and disagreements. Coalitions
should not be understood as a facility to eliminate tensions or conflicts.
Civil and adversarial collaboration should be components of any substrate that
holds coalition governments together. It is ok to differ.
In most cases, accepting
the actual state of power relations by those entering into a coalition would
make the collaboration dimension of the relationship less adversarial. The
reality is that coalitions are about how you configure political power for
stable government. In this context, being the majority party without a
threshold might be a liability and a source of weakness at all material times
during a term of office.
It is how participants
in a coalition broaden their perspective of the power which the majority of
minorities hold that will neutralise periodic political tantrums characterising
coalition governments. Consider a condition where in a coalition you have an
environmentalist, herbalist, sculptor, tree climber, landscape artist, wood
energy dependent person, and a furniture making entrepreneur in a policy making
interaction. Each of these sectors of people has a sufficient number of votes
to stop the other from acting in the forest. It is how the interests of the
coalition deal with the legitimate interests of all in the forest that the
sustainability of the relationship can be maintained.
The coalition setting is
a cocktail of outright disagreements until a point of equilibrium is reached in
how everyone understands each other's interests. When the myopic viewpoint of
those involved checks out of the context and an understanding of other views
checks in, adversarial relationships enter a collaboration phase. The stakes
held in the coalition by role players with proxy representations or
relationships often choke the ability of those at the coal face of engagement
to agree. Invested interests control coalitions.
The stormy relationship
between the two major parties in the GNU is not an anomaly, given their
institutionalised adversarial relationship in the past 30 years of
post-apartheid South Africa. As the ANC and the DA accrue a greater context of
their reality, particularly given their obvious battle to occupy the liberal
centre of RSA politics, a moment of operating within a this and/or that will
triumph over the current either/or spirit we saw in budget negotiations.
It should worry us as a
society when a coalition arrangement that brings together sworn political
adversaries proceeds without tensions, deadlocks, and disagreements. The
toxicity of their arguments or differences should be embraced as a percolation
of the unfolding new context of politics. Unless one party miraculously breaks
through the 50% required threshold, it is inarguable that South Africa will be
a coalition government test site in the African continent after Kenya. It
is still early days for political tantrums to be thrown.
This means the form and
character of the new context's political parties would require a radical
overhaul for those who believe in a big control centre. Political parties
contesting for power might have to organise themselves as a coalition before negotiating
coalition arrangements for state power. This might require a federal posture in
the management of political parties. Disagreement, not anarchy, might have to
be normalised. A new breed of leadership is required; the centre is
unoccupied.
Being in conflict is not
bad for coalition governments; it is fundamental for them to work.
Organisations with high conflict debts that they have not resolved cannot efficiently
operate in coalition arrangements. The debts might be hedged against the
fragile collaboration required to move the country forward. This is why the
next electoral contest might be poised for a grand coalition formed to contest
for power rather than being formed after power. This coalition must be more
averse than disagreement-avoidant for it to be stable.
The succession battles
of the past and present in the dominant political party, the ANC, are its
conflict debts that must be settled for it to get out of the delusion of hoping
for the absolute power to govern to return. Equally, the delusion by the DA
that it can gerrymander the political system to sustain the inequalities that
have become a national grievance, which requires no political party to
facilitate a second revolution, is misplaced. How these parties find each other
will delay the opportunity for mavericks to occupy the deserted vacuum.
Regarding the procedural
issues about the budget, the National Treasury erred in not recalibrating its
way of doing business to the new coalition context. The Treasury missed that in
any context, the fundamental premise of the proverbial Two Truths is that the
other party doesn’t have to be wrong for the other to be right. Both of your
perspectives can be true. Both parties must subject their truth to processing
early enough for it to make sense to the other. CUT!!
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