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Getting to grips with our coalition future

A powerful exception

The ANC has governed South Africa for more than two decades – a long time for any one party to be in power on its own in a multiparty democracy. In fact, only three of the world’s 79 democracies – Botswana, Malaysia and Namibia1 – currently have a governing party that governed on its own for longer than the ANC.

The ANC’s dominance is reflected in the national election results. In South Africa’s first democratic election on 27 April 1994, the ANC, then led by Nelson Mandela, won 62.65 per cent of the vote.2 This increased to 66.35 per cent in 1999, when Thabo Mbeki became president, followed by 69.69 per cent, at the start of Mbeki’s second term, in 2004. This meant that, from 2004 to 2009, the ANC controlled more than two thirds of the seats in the National Assembly, giving the party enough power to change the Constitution on its own. This is likely to go down in history as the high-water mark of single-party hegemony. ANC support slightly declined to 65.90 per cent in 2009, with Zuma poised to become president, followed by a further drop to 62.15 per cent in 2014.

For more than two decades, the ANC has controlled not only the national government, but also at least seven out of nine provinces, and more than 90 per cent of municipalities. Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has been a single-party regime in which it has been hard to imagine the ANC losing a national election.

But the story of single-party dominance actually started long before the ANC got into power. The ANC’s near-complete control since 1994 was preceded by 46 years of one-party rule under the whites-only National Party (NP).3 In fact, under the NP and ANC, South Africa has experienced 70 years of uninterrupted single-party governance.

As a result, South Africans are used to one party calling the shots. We expect most cabinet ministers to belong to a single dominant party, and we are used to having a Parliament in which ‘party discipline’ is enough to ensure that any legislation the ruling party wants is passed without much difficulty. Analysts and observers are also accustomed to blaming corruption and the ANC’s many governance failures on the fact that its dominance is not under threat, and there is thus little incentive for it to govern well.4 As with the once all-conquering NP, the ANC’s dominance has bred arrogance, poor governance, and contempt for South African citizens.

A fading hegemon

But current electoral trends suggest that the ANC’s remarkable run is coming to an end. A combination of endemic corruption, rising crime, a stalled economy, and the party’s staunch defence of Zuma’s patronage network has gradually eroded its support since 2009, and since 2014 this trend has rapidly accelerated.

Figure 1 outlines electoral trends in national and municipal elections from 1994 to 2016, and projects those trends into the future to the 2019 national and provincial elections and the municipal elections in 2021.5 The key takeaway is that, for the first time in 25 years, the ANC may lose its majority in the next national and provincial elections.

Source: Electoral Commission of South Africa.

While earlier efforts to imagine a post-ANC future were largely premised on wishful thinking, the data shows that the time has arrived for South Africans to start imagining what the country’s politics will be like without the dominance of a single party. As Chapter Two will show, the ANC is also in big trouble when it comes to many urban municipalities as well as at the provincial level in the Western Cape, Gauteng, and even North West and the Northern Cape provinces.

Now that it is no longer a foregone conclusion that the ANC will win all upcoming municipal, provincial and national elections, we need to ask the most important question of our time: what will rise when the ANC falls? The answer is that, based on the country’s proportional representation electoral system, the ANC will be replaced not by another single party but by a coalition of political parties. When the two lines in Figure 1 cross, national coalitions will become the default form of government in South Africa.

The purpose of this book is to explore the far-reaching implications of the imminent shift to coalition governance. It is a shift that will force different groups to co-operate and compromise. This will transform South Africa’s political landscape, and the consequences will be felt by everyone.

We should briefly mention the ANC’s long-standing collaboration with the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). Although the ANC, SACP and Cosatu refer to themselves as a ‘tripartite alliance’, until 2017, no South African had ever cast an electoral vote for the SACP or Cosatu. (In November 2017, for the first time ever, the SACP fielded its own candidates in a by-election in the northern Free State municipality of Metsimaholo – Chapter Two returns to this remarkable break with the past). Rather than being proper coalition partners of the ANC, the SACP and Cosatu have thus far merely represented different factions within the ANC. Unlike the tripartite alliance, South Africa will soon have true, democratically elected coalition governments where all coalition partners will have to answer directly to voters.

A permanent Codesa

During the multiparty negotiations at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) in the early 1990s, political leaders and ordinary South Africans alike demonstrated that they were capable of averting a race war, and fostering mutually beneficial outcomes through negotiation and compromise. The success of the Codesa negotiations in producing a democratic dispensation made such a big impression on the national psyche that, during the ensuing decades, political and civic leaders have repeatedly argued that only a ‘new Codesa’ could address South Africa’s persistent social and economic problems.

They may soon get a version of what they wished for. With coalitions set to become the default mode of government from as early as 2019, South Africans will soon be governed by a permanent Codesa in which different political parties are forced to work together.

It is no accident that coalitions will rise when ANC domination falls. During the multiparty negotiations in the early 1990s, leaders from across the political spectrum deliberately designed an electoral system that would encourage coalition governments. Even before formal negotiations over the electoral system began in 1993, there was already near-total agreement between the ANC, NP and the Democratic Party (DP) that a coalition-based electoral system – known as proportional representation – was the way to go. Let’s revisit their reasoning.

In 1993, the ANC’s constitutional specialist, Kader Asmal, declared that South Africa’s cultural, social and economic diversity required an electoral system at all levels that would ‘enable sectoral groups to be adequately represented in decision-making’.6 Given the need to ensure that as many political parties as possible would be represented in Parliament, the drafters of the Constitution chose proportional representation over the main alternative, a winner-take-all system (sometimes also called first-past-the-post).

While winner-take-all systems are arguably more stable because they usually do not require coalitions, Asmal and his associates from different parties explicitly rejected that option because of its tendency to produce governments that do not fully represent all voices in society.7 Under winner-take-all, it is easy for one party to control the national government even with less than half of the national vote. Winner-take-all is a zero-sum game: either your party’s candidate wins, or you have no voice in the legislature or executive. Given the low level of representation inherent to winner-take-all systems, both the interim and final Constitutions eventually stated that the composition of the National Assembly – the lower house of Parliament – should result ‘in general, in proportional representation’.8 With this short phrase, proportional representation became the cornerstone of South Africa’s entire political system.

This decision was based on the desire of the Constitution’s architects to create a ‘new South Africa’ in which inter-group conflict would be superseded by co-operation and compromise. As the term suggests, proportional representation is primarily concerned with ensuring that election outcomes mirror the preferences expressed by all voters – not just by the majority of voters, or even by a majority of a minority. It does this by assigning seats in Parliament in direct proportion to the number of votes any party gets.

In fact, under South Africa’s proportional representation system, any party that wins as little as 0.25 per cent of the national vote will get at least one seat in Parliament. (In the 2014 election, this meant that a party needed only about 45 000 votes to get a single seat.) This is the lowest threshold possible under any electoral framework.9 The system’s inclusivity contrasts starkly with the exclusionary outcomes in winner-take-all countries such as Britain or the United States, and ensures that no one’s vote is wasted.

In South Africa, if party A wins 40 per cent of the national vote, it gets 160 of the 400 seats in the National Assembly. If party B wins 35 per cent of the nationwide vote, it gets exactly 140 seats, while 25 per cent for party C would guarantee it 100 seats. Unlike winner-take-all, proportional representation turns elections into positive-sum games: one party’s victory does not automatically mean that other parties do not make it into Parliament (or into government). It is easy to see why this system is better suited to plural and diverse societies such as South Africa.

But the real power of the proportional representation model kicks in when no party wins more than 50 per cent of the national vote. Let’s assume that the ANC dips just below 50 per cent in the 2019 national election, while the Democratic Alliance (DA), the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), and other opposition parties marginally increasing their shares of the vote. For the first time in post-apartheid South Africa, no single party would be able to form a national government without the support of at least one other party.

This is because the crucial step in forming a government is when the National Assembly elects one of its members as president, who then proceeds to appoint a cabinet. For this to happen, someone needs the support of at least 201 of the 400 MPs. Since 1994, the election of the president has always been a mere formality, as the ANC never had fewer than 249 MPs. But once the party’s share of the popular vote drops below 50 per cent, the ANC will have less than the required 201 seats in the National Assembly. This is the moment when coalitions will move to the epicentre of national politics. When ANC support drops below 50 per cent, any combination of parties will be free to form a government as long as they are able to get 201 MPs to vote for their preferred presidential candidate.

Even if the ANC was still the largest party – even if it had 199 seats, and its closest competitor only had 120 – it would still be out of power if opposition parties managed to form a coalition that added together all of their 201 seats. However, the ANC would remain in power if it managed to convince a party with just two seats to join it in a coalition, and support its presidential candidate.

The rule is simple: whichever party’s candidate gets 201 or more votes becomes president. The president then appoints a deputy president, ministers, and deputy ministers to his or her cabinet, thereby formally assembling a government.

Once coalitions become the norm, seemingly minor political parties will suddenly begin to play tremendously important roles. In the above scenario, the ANC would need to convince a minority party with only two Parliamentary seats (equal to only 0.5 per cent of the vote, or about 90 000 votes) to join it in a coalition. This means that the two parties would need to strike a deal. Based on experiences in other countries governed by coalitions, such a deal usually entails that the junior partner gets a few important portfolios, like foreign affairs or even the deputy presidency. The senior partner will generally also have to agree to some policy concessions to convince the smaller party to join it. This means that parties representing minority interests, such as the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) or the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), could soon play an important role in governing South Africa.

But there is another potential outcome. If no group of parties in the National Assembly is able to cobble together a formal alliance that would take them over the 201-seat mark, the country could get a so-called minority government. Similar to what happened in Johannesburg and Tshwane after the 2016 municipal election, a group of parties may agree to support the same candidate for president without constituting a formal coalition.

The proportional representation system therefore precisely reflects the will of the voters, even if their will is that no one party should have enough power to form a government on its own. In a plural society like ours, proportional representation will soon lead to a fractured political landscape in which it will be very difficult for any one party to get consistent majorities.

Defying destiny

But this prediction also raises an obvious question: if South Africa’s electoral framework encourages coalitions, why has the ANC been able to rule on its own since 1994? Indeed, in countries with proportional representation systems, coalition governments are the rule, and one-party majorities the rare exceptions. This makes the ANC’s two decades of domination even more impressive, as its majorities were not artificially inflated by the vagaries of winner-take-all. Instead, the opposite happened – the ANC achieved its majorities in a system explicitly designed to encourage plurality and coalition governance.

The ANC’s dominance since 1994 is a powerful illustration that although rules and structures favour certain outcomes over others (in this case, coalition rather than majoritarian government), they are never enough to guarantee that those outcomes will materialise. Although the rules of our electoral system favour multiparty coalitions over single-party majorities, democracy means that those rules are not absolute. They can be overridden wherever voters strongly prefer a single party.

This is precisely what happened during South Africa’s first two-and-a-half decades of democracy, as the ANC’s liberation narrative proved powerful enough to overcome the logic of the electoral system. The ANC was so overwhelmingly popular that it was able to engineer single-party rule in an environment that actively discouraged it.

But once the power of the ANC’s liberation narrative is sufficiently weakened, and its mighty majorities vanish, South African politics will be transformed. This will be no accident, as the proportional representation of every cultural, ethnic and political group, as well as forced coalitions among them, is precisely what constitutional framers from opposite ends of the political spectrum envisioned when they wrote the rules in the mid-1990s.

The ANC’s ability to overcome the tendency towards coalitions meant that citizens wrongly became used to the idea that South African democracy entails clear and unbending distinctions between one powerful governing party and an amalgam of minor opposition parties nipping at the ANC’s heels. One indication of this perception is audible whenever someone speaks of the ANC as a ‘ruling’ party.

This term has authoritarian overtones; it may be appropriate to describe a dictator as a ‘ruler’, but a democratically elected government does not rule over its citizens. It governs on their behalf. That ‘ruling party’ instead of ‘governing party’ has become the default way to describe the ANC in public discussions says a lot about South Africans’ perception of the party as an all-powerful entity capable of enforcing its will. The widespread use of the authoritarian-sounding ‘ruling party’ is not a trivial detail: it shows how South Africans have come to regard the exceptional situation of single-party dominance as the norm.

This perception of the ANC will soon come crashing down. While the party has thus far used its powerful history to thwart the electoral system’s tendency towards coalitions, its fast declining electoral fortunes means this domination is in its death throes. In its place, coalition governments will rise.

Roadmap to the future

This book’s analysis of our coalition future proceeds from three assumptions. The first is that the trend outlined in Figure 1 is set to continue – in other words, that the ANC’s electoral decline will not be arrested in the short term. This means it will become increasingly difficult for the party to garner majorities in metropolitan municipalities like Tshwane, Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Nelson Mandela Bay, as well as in larger rural centres like Rustenburg and Polokwane. The result is that, at the municipal level, the ANC will increasingly resemble a rural-based party, while urban competitors like the DA and EFF will continue to make inroads in the cities.

This bottom-up process of change is currently accelerating to the point where the ANC will soon lose its majority in the urbanised province of Gauteng, while the Western Cape will remain out of its reach. Its winning margins in other provinces will also decline, with North West and the Northern Cape perhaps third and fourth in line to fall. (Dissatisfaction of Zuma loyalists with Ramaphosa means that even KwaZulu-Natal might soon be up for grabs.) As soon as 2019, this trend could culminate in the ANC losing its majority in a national election. With no party able to muster 50 per cent of the national vote, this will mark the final death knell of single-party domination in South Africa. However, this does not imply that the ANC will fade from the political scene. Even in South Africa’s approaching coalition future, the ANC is likely to remain the single biggest political force. But it will no longer be near-invincible.

Could another political party replace the ANC as a dominant force that controls the national government as well as most of the country’s provinces and municipalities? This points to our second assumption, namely that the end of ANC majorities will probably mean the beginning of no majorities. Despite the fact that the EFF in particular likes to talk about itself as a ‘government in waiting’10 – and despite media coverage that often portrays electoral choices as either/or scenarios – neither the EFF, DA, or any other party will become dominant once the ANC falls below 50 per cent.

Instead, we will soon have dozens of situations where, for example, a local municipality is governed by the DA in coalition with the EFF and an independent councillor, while the surrounding district municipality may be controlled by an ANC-Congress of the People (COPE) coalition. In turn, both of those municipalities might be nestled within a province run by a coalition between the DA, the United Democratic Movement (UDM) and the FF+, while a coalition comprising the ANC, the National Freedom Party (NFP) and the ACDP could be in control at the national level. To survive and thrive in our coalition future, we must urgently prepare to deal with a scale of political complexity we have never seen or experienced before.

The third assumption is the most fundamental, as it presumes that elections will remain free and fair, and that the ANC will remain willing to give up power where and when its dominant majorities disappear. As regards the fairness of elections, the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) has been widely praised for its competent administration of the electoral process.11 But a recent ruling by the Constitutional Court exposed the fact that the IEC had failed to capture the addresses of up to 16 million of the 24 million voters on the national voters’ roll. In June 2016, the court gave the IEC 18 months to make sure that all voters’ address details were correctly captured on the voters’ roll.12 For our election results to remain credible, the IEC must urgently repair the damage.

But even if our elections remain free and fair, it is still not a given that the ANC – used to being in near-total control of South African politics – would accept defeat at the polls, particularly at the national level. On the one hand, there are some encouraging signs. Even though the party branded the DA’s 2009 victory in the Western Cape as a triumph for ‘racists’, and referred to its main opposition as ‘the enemy’, the ANC did accept defeat.13 Even more significant was the relatively peaceful transfer of power from the ANC to opposition parties in the major municipalities of Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay after the 2016 local elections.

However, there have also been worrying indications that the party will not always be gracious in defeat. In the Western Cape, a few years ago, some ANC leaders declared in public that the ANC would seek to make the province ’ungovernable’, with the aim of unseating the DA. (These declarations only abated when Helen Zille, provincial premier and then leader of the DA, pointed out that these statements constituted a prima facie instance of sedition, and criminal charges were laid against ANC Youth League leaders.)14 In all three big cities the ANC lost in 2016, ANC councillors have also been involved in periodic violent skirmishes against the new leadership.15

Finally, and most disturbingly, the run-up to the 2016 municipal election was marred by a spate of political assassinations in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng,16 and another wave of killings broke out in KwaZulu-Natal in 2017. These served as a warning that some ANC functionaries were willing to kill to hold on to power. One can only hope that this murderous tendency does not serve as harbinger of the ANC’s attitude to electoral defeat.

If these three assumptions hold up – that the ANC’s decline will continue, that no opposition party will become dominant, and that elections will remain free and fair – coalition politics is guaranteed to emerge as the new leitmotiv for South African society. The rest of this book grapples with the implications. It is divided into three parts. The first part explains why it is only now, after more than two decades of democracy, that coalitions are set to become the default form of government. The second part explores what coalitions are likely to mean via three coalition scenarios. Finally, the third part looks at practical examples of how to make coalitions work.

Even if the ANC manages to sneak above the 50 per cent mark in 2019, its fast declining fortunes (as discussed in Chapter Two) make it clear that the era of one-party dominance is coming to an end. The simple reality is that the ANC will not remain in power forever – neither at the municipal, provincial nor national level. This book argues that the turning point at the national level will probably come in 2019, but the exact date of the ANC’s fall is less important than the fact that coalitions will soon become the default form of government in South Africa. Whether the ANC loses its national majority in 2019 or 2024, the key point is that wherever the party loses an election, it will likely be replaced by a coalition government. South Africans must urgently start preparing for this new reality.