Coalition rule never an easy choice
COALITION politics are not as easy as they look, if the recent reports about constant spats between the mayor of Nelson Mandela Bay Metro Athol Trollip and his deputy Mongameli Bobani are anything to go by.
It would seem, as reports suggest, that the two cannot work well with one another and their relationship is fraught with incriminations and recriminations.
On the one hand, Trollip accuses Bobani of being “uncontrollable and undermining the coalition”.
On the other hand, Bobani counters that the mayor does not “consult properly and infringes on his independence as a representative of another political party”.
The spat between these two protagonists has even merited an intervention by their principals to try and calm the situation.
The coalition still soldiers on and continues to provide object lessons as we anticipate 2019.
At the risk of stating the obvious: politics is about power, purely and simply.
It is true that the Democratic Alliance got relatively more votes than the United Democratic Movement in last year’s local government elections.
It is also true that the former party did not get the requisite 50% plus one vote to allow it to govern the metro council on its own.
Hence it needed coalition partners, not only to edge out the erstwhile rulers of the metro, the African National Congress, but to govern.
Coalition politics is essentially a marriage of convenience, not a symbiotic relationship between parties of the same ideological outlook.
One, the DA, is a purely liberal party and the other, the UDM, is more of an African nationalist party.
The DA might be forgiven for thinking that with relatively more votes than the UDM it has been granted a mandate by the electorate to govern.
However, the UDM can just as easily claim that as a partner in the coalition – not there just for the convenience of making up the numbers – it ought to be accorded the respect it believes it is due.
Should the UDM feel it is not being consulted it can stonewall and the council cannot pass the Integrated Development Plan and service delivery will be stalled.
When service delivery is affected the ANC will not be too distressed as this will be grist to their own mill. They can then glibly point to the failures of the DA and convince the electorate of their “folly” in giving the DA a chance to govern.
Sadly, if the spats between Trollip and Bobani persist it may lead, in the longterm, to voters punishing them at the polls in 2021 (the next local government elections) and not trusting them with power for the national elections in 2019.
To a greater or lesser extent the apparent instability in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro gives us a reasonably good glimpse of what might happen should a coalition government come in at national level in 2019.
Whatever happens in the NMBM council should serve as a lesson to all parties going forwards.
There will be bickering among the coalition partners and it may affect service delivery.
Lolonga Tali is a regular contributor to the Daily Dispatch and lives in King William’s Town.