Coalition country
Alliances to expect in a post-majority SA
● Two decades from now, it will seem almost absurd that South African politics was once totally dominated by the 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% 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”.
The ANC won’t disappear. However, it will soon lose its iron grip on the country’s politics, with ANC singleparty 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 from December 16 to 20, 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, was held in thrall by the prospect of the ANC electing a new leader to replace the corrupt and destructive 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. 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 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 was 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.
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 lost its majorities in Nelson Mandela Bay, Johannesburg and Tshwane in the 2016 local elections. That Zuma could laugh in the face of such a defeat not only attested to his arrogance, but also to the inability to imagine the ANC ever losing an important election.
The assumption that the party will be in power “forever” is so deeply ingrained 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 are reserved for multiparty elections.
But in SA, 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.
Schreiber is a political commentator and research specialist at Princeton University. This is an edited extract from the introduction to Coalition Country: South Africa After the ANC by Leon Schreiber, published by Tafelberg, R280