With a deal to form a multiparty national executive for the seventh administration apparently imminent, most of us will breathe a collective sigh of relief that the uncertainty is finally at an end.
It has been an intense four weeks, a period in which South Africa entered the uncharted territory of hung legislatures and coalitions at national level.
Although none can claim to have been completely surprised by the results of the May 29 elections, which produced no 50%+1 winner, subsequent political developments suggest that none of the large parties was entirely prepared for the new era.
At times the players appeared to be opting for ideological straitjackets — setting preconditions as to whom they were, or were not, prepared to work with — when the moment demanded political pragmatism.
The country is in need of a reset, the kind that cannot be delivered through the normal parliamentary processes
The unnecessarily public squabbling over cabinet posts that we witnessed during the past week will surely add to the already negative public perception of politicians caring more about their own stomachs than what is good for South Africa.
That is the nature of our politics — quarrelsome and noisy, but somehow always able to close a deal when one is needed.
Maybe this is what Jan Smuts meant when he famously said that in South Africa “the worst, like the best, never happens”. But that was many decades ago and his was a different South Africa, one in which we were not all embraced as equal citizens.
Still, after much anxiety and public bickering over whether the country would be better off with a power-sharing arrangement that included the DA, or one in which the ANC partnered with its estranged offshoots in the form of the EFF and MK Party, we may go to bed tonight with a national cabinet in place.
The parties to the deal will soon convene a cabinet lekgotla where, hopefully, a programme for the next five years will be agreed. This will give President Cyril Ramaphosa a line of march ahead of his first state of the nation address as the leader of the new administration.
But surely that is not where things should end, with us all going our separate ways and leaving everything to the government of national unity (GNU).
As the election results demonstrated, South Africans are ill at ease.
In great numbers — as shown by the fact that only 64% of eligible voters are registered to vote and that only 58% of this cohort bothered to turn up on election day — they are losing faith in the political system’s ability to solve their problems.
The country is in need of a reset, the kind that cannot be delivered through the normal parliamentary processes.
When he announced his intention to form a GNU, Ramaphosa said he wanted to initiate an all-inclusive national dialogue that would not be limited to political parties.
The idea, first popularised by former president Thabo Mbeki long before the ANC saw its presence in parliament slashed to 40%, has gained much traction with several foundations representing some of the country’s best minds indicating their support.
But there have also been those expressing scepticism. One well-known commentator this week insinuated that the likes of Mbeki were pushing the idea only because the ANC had lost it hegemony, and that to participate in such an initiative would amount to propping up a crisis-riddled, dying liberation movement.
Other critics of the initiative have wondered aloud why, so soon after an election, the country needs an extraparliamentary platform to discuss the country’s affairs when the National Assembly and the National Council of Provinces were established for that very purpose.
The reality, however, is that our problems — ranging from disappointingly low growth and extremely high unemployment to widening inequality and worsening poverty — require the minds of far more than just MPs and their political parties.
Let us not repeat the mistake of our sister country, Kenya, following its general election two years ago, which was won by President William Ruto.
Kenya soon experienced demonstrations against the rising cost of living, but these were mostly ignored by the new administration, which, armed with a fresh mandate from the electorate, assumed that it had the population on its side.
Instead of listening to the voices of protest, Ruto’s government embarked on a series of economic reforms aimed at reducing public debt.
Things came to a head this week when Kenya’s youth, victims, like ours, of an astronomical unemployment rate, took to the streets in protest against a finance bill that imposed extremely high taxes on bread, cooking oil and other basic goods.
If there is any lesson to be learnt from the Kenyan experience, it is that a national dialogue about the future cannot be left to parliamentarians, and it cannot exclude the people most affected by our economic poly-crises — the youth.
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