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Two decades from now, it will seem almost absurd that South African politics was once totally dominated by the African National Congress (ANC). The current reality, with the ANC holding overwhelming power at the national, provincial and municipal levels, will seem just as foreign to the next generation as the idea of a white minority government to most South Africans today. By then, our political system will be fundamentally different; South Africa will be governed by coalitions, with no single party holding more than 50 per cent of the vote.

Jacob Zuma will be remembered not only as a megalomaniac whose greed brought the country to the brink of collapse, but also as an example of how absolute power corrupts absolutely. In one of the most culturally diverse societies on earth, and with dozens of different political coalitions in charge across the country, history students in the year 2038 will marvel at the hubris of Zuma’s 2014 prediction that the ANC will ‘run this government forever and ever … until Jesus comes back’.1

The ANC won’t disappear. However, it will soon lose its iron grip on the country’s politics, with ANC single-party governments replaced by a broad range of political coalitions. Travelling across this vast and beautiful country, the next generation of South Africans will encounter radically different governments from one municipality and province to another, while no single party will have absolute power at the national level. The history class of 2038 might well look back at the 2019 national and provincial elections as the turning point that put South Africa firmly on the path to coalition politics.

The debate that dominated South African public life in the build-up to the ANC’s 54th national elective conference, held in Johannesburg on 16–20 December 2017, was symptomatic of a country that has been psychologically colonised by one-party domination. In the weeks leading up to the event, everyone, from stockbrokers and bankers to farmers and construction workers, were held in thrall by the prospect of the ANC electing a new leader to replace the corrupt and destructive Jacob Zuma.

Like the ocean tides following the cycles of the moon, the South African rand rose and fell in response to speculation about whether billionaire businessman Cyril Ramaphosa would emerge victorious from the conference, or whether Zuma’s ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, would walk away with the dubious honour of becoming the next leader of the corrupt gang that the ANC had become.

In the days following the news that Ramaphosa had won the party’s internal leadership contest, the rand rose to a two-and-a-half-year high.2 This was despite the fact that the ANC had also officially adopted populist policies like the nationalisation of the Reserve Bank and the expropriation of commercial farmland without compensation, which would – if implemented – drop a nuclear bomb on South Africa’s financial system. After the conference, Ramaphosa’s cheerleaders also declared that he was about to rid the party of corruption, even though the ANC is entirely fuelled by it, and despite the fact that he would have to contend with an internal leadership packed with Zuma’s fellow trough-feeders.

Why exactly is it that South Africans from all walks of life were so obsessed with the ANC’s elective conference? After all, the country is nominally a multiparty democracy, so why pay so much attention to – and bet so much money on – the internal manoeuvres of a single political party? The answer is that, for the past two-and-a-half decades, every political discussion in South Africa has been almost entirely premised on one central assumption: that the ANC, and the ANC alone, would continue to govern this country.

Therefore, Jacob Zuma is not the only one who believes the ANC will run South Africa ‘until Jesus comes back’. Whether they support the party or not, almost all South Africans share his belief that the ANC will be in power for the foreseeable future. Even ardent opposition supporters will admit that the idea of the ANC losing national power has always been more of a pipe dream than a tangible goal. Most South Africans simply cannot imagine their country without the ANC in charge. It really is extraordinary that the party has been so dominant since coming to power in 1994 that it even holds sway over the imaginations of those who despise it.

Zuma in fact perfectly illustrated the belief in the ANC’s invincibility when he reportedly burst out laughing after his party had lost its majorities in Nelson Mandela Bay, Johannesburg and Tshwane in the 2016 local elections.3 That Zuma can laugh in the face of such a defeat not only attests to his arrogance, but also the inability to imagine the ANC ever losing an important election. The assumption that the party will be in power ‘forever’ is so deeply engrained in the South African psyche that it goes almost entirely unexamined.

In contrast, in consolidated democracies where power changes hands regularly, the levels of excitement and intrigue that accompanied the ANC’s national elective conference is only reserved for multiparty elections. But in South Africa, the ANC’s near-complete dominance means that the outcomes of the party’s internal contests have become more important than those of actual elections involving different political parties. Since 1994, citizens have thus correctly assumed that whoever becomes ANC president will almost automatically become the country’s president.

But this is not inevitable. Despite the ANC’s dominance, South Africa remains an electoral democracy, where multiparty polls are the real determinant of who becomes the next president. This book shows that, for the first time since 1994, there is no guarantee that ANC president Ramaphosa will automatically become the South African president. Given the party’s rapid downward slide, it is high time for all citizens to start imagining a future without the ANC in outright control of the country.

In practice, this means that the financial traders who are relieved and enthused by Ramaphosa’s internal victory should not count their chickens before they hatch. Instead of assuming that the supposedly business-friendly Ramaphosa will easily win the 2019 national election, financial sector professionals should invest in serious planning for the possibility of the ANC losing that election. To use an investment metaphor: it would be dangerous simply to extrapolate the ANC’s past electoral returns into the future.

Equally, farmers and the millions of citizens who are anxious about the ANC’s plan to grab farmland and other property should keep in mind that it is no longer 1994, and that the party’s loss of moral authority puts it on a path to be out of power soon, meaning that those destructive plans may remain on paper only. The same goes for every other industry and citizen in the country who has thus far merely assumed that because the ANC was dominant in the past, it will remain dominant in the future.

But with our democracy having grown up in a state of one-party domination, imagining a South Africa devoid of ANC hegemony is easier said than done. What, exactly, should we be planning for if the ANC gets less than 50 per cent of the vote in 2019?

This book seeks to answer this question by showing why South Africa is on the cusp of another great transformation, in which coalition politics will move to the centre of our national life once the ANC loses its dominant position. It not only documents the rapid and ongoing decline of the once all-conquering ANC, but also shows how and why South Africa’s electoral system favours coalitions over single-party governments, and why none of the current opposition parties will soon be able to garner majorities on their own.

It also examines coalition best practice elsewhere in the world, and explores what different coalition configurations are likely to mean for the country. What would a national DA-EFF government, ANC-EFF government, or minority government look like? What compromises could they strike, and what policies are they likely to implement?

By opening a conversation about the dramatic changes that could accompany the dawn of the coalition era, this book seeks to illuminate the path towards imagining a South Africa in which vibrant – if sometimes chaotic – multiparty politics replaces the stale domination of single-party rule.