In 2021’s local government elections, voters in a rapidly growing number of municipalities refused to give absolute power to any one political party.
A combination of dismal turnout — out of 40-million South Africans over the age of 18, only 12-million voted — and vote-splitting signalled an electorate with low confidence in and high mistrust of the political players on the ballot.
In 2024, voter dissatisfaction combined with a proportional representation (PR) electoral system that rarely produces dominant party governments will likely result in a hung national parliament and at least two hung provincial legislatures — Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.
Disillusionment among the electorate aside, this was always what lay in South Africa’s political future. PR systems can produce single-party dominance during times of political transition, but with our democracy now more established, a proliferation of political parties coupled with a lack of constituency or district boundaries means that once the ANC falls below 50%, no single party is likely to ever win a national majority in South Africa again.
Not under the current system, at least.
Voting by district exists precisely to avert this type of outcome and steer political systems in the direction of two-party politics.
When you know that your vote will count for nothing if your local candidate loses, you are more likely to pick a winnable compromise candidate who you can live with, rather than the one you actually want.
This is what the Italian political scientist Giovanni Sartori meant when he referred to electoral systems as "‘the most specific manipulative instrument of politics”.
In winner-takes-all political systems, marginal seats — where the margin between two parties is so slim that the result could easily go either way — usually produce even less representative outcomes.
In such systems, a political party can cumulatively amass only 35% of the national vote and still command a majority in parliament. It can likewise end up without a single seat in the legislature, because the only votes that count towards the formation of a parliamentary majority are those belonging to the winning district candidates.
The approach of most political parties to the painstaking and complex work of government negotiations has, until now, mostly been 'just vibes'
In full PR systems, by contrast, every single vote counts towards the distribution of parliamentary seats, and thresholds are determined by the number of people who turn out to vote, with higher turnouts automatically raising the threshold for winning a single seat in the legislature.
All of this is to say, we can hem and haw and complain about “instability” and “political immaturity” all we like; coalitions are here to stay.
In fact, the instability of the current constellation of metro municipality coalitions — with Johannesburg at its nadir — is precisely what will intensify this political fragmentation.
One of the ways voters express political distrust is by splitting their vote between parties — whether between the PR and ward ballots in local elections, or between the provincial and national ballots in general elections.
When no single political party inspires confidence that it can govern in good faith, voters can choose to force the parties into relationships of mutual dependence.
The parlous state of the political arrangements in South Africa’s metros has generated a raft of recommendations for stabilising coalition governance using legal and oversight instruments.
Some of the most prominent of these are also examples of how to dilute voters’ electoral choices or impose command and control over decision-making which, by its very definition, is meant to be political rather than official.
From a presidential commission to oversee coalition governments to legislative proposals to limit the number of motions of no confidence which a council or legislature may put to the vote, they also largely misdiagnose the coalition government challenges as systemic, rather than as the consequences of poor interpersonal relationships and leadership abilities.
Some of the recommendations proffered by the very political parties wreaking havoc in the councils constitute thinly veiled attempts to entrench the power of the largest minority party, after it fails to win that power through a simple majority at election time.
So, how do we end the reckless game of musical chairs that has come to define coalition governance in South Africa’s biggest municipalities?
We urgently need to invest in the work of capacity building. Not just at the skills level; we need to develop in our country’s political leadership the internal capacity and fortitude of character required to manage the uncertainty and volatility of negotiating the formation of governments responsible for millions of lives and hundreds of billions of rands in public funding and expenditure.
If news reports and party leaks are to be believed, the approach of most political parties to the painstaking and complex work of government negotiations has, until now, mostly been “just vibes”.
Unfortunately, when what is at stake is the formation of governments managing about R80bn in annual budgets in cities like Johannesburg, more than R150bn annually in Gauteng alone, and more than R2.2-trillion in annual expenditures at the national level, “vibes” alone simply will not suffice.
In other sectors, the highly qualified industry professionals overseeing negotiations over smaller sums of money with significantly lower stakes — be they lawyers presiding over the transfer or consolidation of company ownership, or company executives and trade union representatives negotiating employee wages and working conditions — are expected to take the time to immerse themselves in both the theory and practice of negotiation.
Why don’t we expect the same of our country’s political leaders? Indeed, why do we not demand it?
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