COALITION GOVERNMENT WILL SURVIVE WHEN WE EMBRACE DISAGREEMENT

 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!!